Just Mercy_ A story of Justice and Redemption ( PDFDrive )

Dothan, even in a poor section of town, posed a different kind of threat than “typical”
domestic violence. The prosecutor argued that Herbert was not just tragically misguided and
reckless; he was evil. The State sought the death penalty. After striking all of the black
prospective jurors in a county that is 28 percent black, the prosecutor told the all-white jury
in his closing argument that a conviction was appropriate because Herbert was “associated
with Black Muslims from New York City” and deserved no mercy.

Alabama’s capital statute requires that any murder eligible for the death penalty be
intentional, but it was clear that Herbert had no intent to kill the child. The State decided to
invoke an unprecedented theory of “transferred intent” to make the crime eligible for the
death penalty. But Herbert had no intention to kill anyone. Herbert was advised to deny any
culpability but ultimately argued that this was reckless murder, not capital murder, which
could be punished with life imprisonment but not the death penalty.

During the trial, the appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Herbert’s
background, his military service, his trauma from the war, his relationship with the victim,
his obsession with the girlfriend—nothing. Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-
appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the
lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over a day, and the judge
quickly condemned Herbert to death.

Following the imposition of the death sentence, Herbert’s appointed lawyer, who was later
disbarred for poor performance in other cases, told Herbert that he didn’t see any reason to
appeal the conviction or sentence because the trial had been as fair as he could expect.
Herbert reminded him that he’d been sentenced to death. He wanted to appeal no matter how
unlikely the prospects, but his lawyer filed no brief.

Herbert was confined on death row for eleven years, until it was his time to face “Yellow
Mama.” A volunteer lawyer had challenged the intent questions in a desperate appeal but was
unsuccessful. Herbert’s execution was now set for August 18, just three weeks away.

After my call with Herbert, I filed a flurry of stay motions in various courts. I knew the
odds were low that we would block the execution. By the late 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court
had grown impatient with challenges to capital punishment. The Court had justified
reauthorization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s on the promise that proceedings would
be subject to heightened scrutiny and meticulous compliance with the law but then began to
retreat from the existing review procedures. The Court’s rulings had become increasingly
hostile to death row prisoners and less committed to the notion that “death is different,”
requiring more careful review.

The Court decided to bar claims from federal habeas corpus review if they weren’t initially
presented to state courts. Federal courts were then forbidden to consider new evidence unless
it was first presented to state courts. The Court began insisting that federal judges defer more
to state court rulings, which tended to be more indulgent of errors and defects in capital
proceedings.

In the 1980s, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to imposing the death penalty on
juveniles; upheld the death penalty for disabled people suffering from “mental retardation”;
and, in a widely condemned opinion, found no constitutional violation in the extreme racial
disparities that could be seen throughout most death penalty jurisdictions.

By the end of the decade, some justices had become openly critical of the review that death

penalty cases received. Chief Justice William Rehnquist urged restrictions on death penalty
appeals and the endless efforts of lawyers to stop executions. “Let’s get on with it,” he
famously declared at a bar association event in 1988. Finality, not fairness, had become the
new priority in death penalty jurisprudence.

Two weeks after my first conversation with Herbert Richardson, I was frantically trying to get
a stay of execution. Even though it was very late in the process, I was hoping that we might
win a stay when I saw some of the compelling issues in Herbert’s case. While his guilt wasn’t
really in question, there were persuasive reasons why this case should not have been a capital
murder case, above and beyond the absence of a specific intent to kill. And even if you
disregard that part of it, there was strong evidence that the death penalty should not be
imposed because of Herbert’s trauma, military service, and childhood difficulties. None of this
compelling mitigating evidence was presented at trial, and it should have been. The death
penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might
not be the appropriate sentence, and that didn’t happen in Herbert’s case. I was increasingly
becoming convinced that Herbert was facing execution because he had been an easy target.
He was unaided and easily condemned by a system that was inattentive to the precise legal
requirements of capital punishment. I was deeply distressed that, had he gotten the right help
at the right time, Herbert would not be on death row with an execution date in less than two
weeks.

I asked several courts to stay Herbert’s execution because of his ineffective lawyer, racial
bias during the trial, the inflammatory comments made by the prosecutor, and the lack of
mitigation evidence presented. Each court said, “Too late.” We got a hastily scheduled
hearing in the trial court in Dothan, where I tried to present evidence that the bomb Herbert
had constructed was designed to go off at a certain time. I found an expert to testify that the
bomb was a timed device and not intended to kill on contact. I knew that the court would
probably conclude that this evidence should have been presented at trial or in prior
proceedings, but I hoped that the judge could be persuaded.

Herbert was in court with me, and we both immediately recognized the lack of interest on
the judge’s face. This heightened Herbert’s anxiety. He began a whispered dialogue with me,
imploring me to get the testifying expert to say things about his intent that were really
outside the expert’s knowledge. He became contentious and started making comments that
were audible to the judge. Meanwhile, the judge kept stressing that the evidence wasn’t
newly discovered and should have been presented at trial, so it couldn’t create a basis for a
stay of execution. I asked for a brief recess to try and calm Herbert down.

“He’s not saying what I need him to say!”
His breathing was panicked. He held his head and told me he had a severe headache. “I
didn’t intend to kill anybody and he has to explain that!” he cried.
I tried to comfort him. “Mr. Richardson, we’ve covered this. The expert isn’t allowed to
speak to your mental state. He’s testified that the bomb was designed to be detonated, but he
can’t really explain your motivations—the Court won’t permit that, and he really can’t speak
to that.”
“They’re not even paying attention to what he’s saying,” he said sadly, rubbing his temples.
“I know, but remember, this is just the first step. We didn’t expect much from this judge,

but this will help us on appeal. I know this is frustrating for you.” He looked at me worriedly
before sighing in resignation. He sat glumly through the rest of the hearing, holding his head,
which I found even more disheartening than when he was argumentative and distraught.

Because I hadn’t hired any lawyers yet, I didn’t have co-counsel to sit with me and help
manage documents or help with the defendant during the hearing. At the end of the
proceeding, Herbert was shackled and sent back to death row, vexed, disappointed, and
unhappy. I wasn’t feeling much better as I packed up my things and headed out of the
courtroom. It would have been nice to debrief with someone, to evaluate whether what was
presented might provide a basis for a stay. I had no expectation that the local judge would
grant a stay, but I was hopeful that maybe a reviewing court would recognize that this wasn’t
an intentional killing and that a stay should be granted. So much was going on that I couldn’t
objectively evaluate if we had presented enough evidence to change the picture of the case. I
mostly felt bad that I’d left Herbert in such a distraught state.

On my way out, I saw a group of black women and children huddled together in the back
of the courtroom. Seven or eight of them were watching me intensely. The hearing had been
set in the late afternoon when there were no other proceedings scheduled. I was curious
about who these people might be, but honestly, I was too tired to really care. I smiled and
nodded a weary greeting to the three women who seemed most focused on me, which they
took as a cue to approach me as I was about to walk out the door.

The woman who spoke seemed nervous and somewhat fearful. She spoke hesitantly: “I’m
Rena Mae’s mother—the victim’s mother. They said they would help us, but they never did.
MaryLynn can’t hear right, her hearing ain’t never been right since that bomb, and her sister
has nerve problems. I got ’em, too. We were hoping you would help us.”

The stunned look on my face prompted her to say more. “I know you’re busy. It’s just that
we could use the help.” I realized that she’d cautiously offered her hand to me as she spoke,
and I held it in mine.

“I’m so very sorry you haven’t received the help you’ve been promised. But I actually
represent Herbert Richardson in this case,” I said as gently as I could.

“We know that. I know you might not be able to do anything right now, but when this is
over, can you help us? They said we’d get some money for medical help and help for my
daughter’s hearing.”

A young woman had quietly approached the woman as she spoke to me and embraced her.
While she was probably in her early twenties, she acted in every other respect like a very
small child. She leaned her head into her mother’s side like a much younger child would and
looked at me sadly. Another woman approached and spoke somewhat defiantly. “I’m her
auntie,” she said. “We don’t believe in killin’ people.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she was trying to say, but I looked at her and replied, “Yes, I
don’t believe in killing people, either.”

The aunt seemed to relax a little. “All this grievin’ is hard. We can’t cheer for that man you
trying to help but don’t want to have to grieve for him, too. There shouldn’t be no more
killing behind this.”

“I don’t know what I can do to help you all but I do want to help. Please contact me after
August 18, and I’ll see what I can find out.”

The aunt then asked me if she could have her son write to me because he was in prison and

needed a lawyer. She sighed with relief when I gave her my card. As we all left the
courthouse, we offered each other solemn goodbyes.

“We’ll pray for you,” the aunt said as they departed.
On the way to my car, I considered asking them to say something to the prosecutor and
state lawyers about not wanting Mr. Richardson to be executed, although it was clear that the
State wasn’t acting on behalf of these victims. The courtroom had been filled with state
lawyers and other officials watching the hearing, but they had long since fled the courthouse
without so much as a word to any of the battered souls standing in the back of the room. I
was haunted by the tragic irony that they felt I was their best hope for help.
The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to
Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it.
With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after
the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion
for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court
grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request
to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the
Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a
stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final
decision to permit an execution to proceed or not.
The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M. on August 18. I had finally finished the petition

and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my
Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by
reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the
Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning.
Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I
was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the
governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect
anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why
military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion.

I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was
executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not
spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic.

I spoke with Herbert regularly during the day by phone to let him know there was no news.
I couldn’t rely on the prison to get a message to him if the Court ruled, so I asked him to call
me every two hours. Whatever the news, I wanted him to hear it from someone who cared
about him.

Herbert had met a woman from Mobile with whom he had corresponded over the years.
They had decided to get married a week before the execution. Herbert had no money, nothing
to offer her if he was executed. But he was a military veteran, so his survivors were entitled
to receive an American flag upon his death. He designated his new wife as the person to
whom the flag should be presented. In the days leading up to the execution, it seemed that
Herbert was more concerned about his flag than his impending execution. He kept asking me
to check with the government about how his flag would be delivered and urging me to get a
commitment in writing.

His new wife’s family had agreed to spend the last few hours with Herbert before the
execution. The prison allowed family members to stay until about 10:00 P.M., when they would

begin to prepare the condemned for execution. I was still in my office waiting to receive word
from the Supreme Court. When the clock passed 5:00 P.M. without any news, I allowed myself

to become cautiously hopeful. If the Court wasn’t troubled by anything we’d presented, I
expected an earlier ruling on our motion for a stay. So the later it got, the more encouraged I
became. At 6:00 P.M. I was pacing in my small office, nervously running through the

possibilities of what the Court might be debating so close to the execution hour. Eva and our
new investigator, Brenda Lewis, waited with me. Finally, a little before 7:00 P.M., the phone

rang. The clerk of the Court was on the line.
“Mr. Stevenson, I’m calling to let you know that the Court has just entered an order in Case

No. 89-5395; the motion for a stay of execution and petition for writ of certiorari have been
denied. We’ll fax copies of the order to your office shortly.”

And with that, the conversation ended. When I hung up, all I could think was, why would I
need a copy of the order? To whom did the clerk think I would show it? In a matter of hours,
Herbert would be dead. There would be no more appeals, no more records to keep. I’m not
sure why I was struck by these peculiar details. Maybe thinking about the procedural
absurdities of the Court’s order was less overwhelming than thinking about its meaning. I had
promised Herbert I would be with him during the execution, and it took me a few minutes to
realize I needed to move quickly to get to the prison two hours away.

I jumped in my car and raced to Atmore. As I drove down the interstate to reach the prison,
I noticed the long rays of sunlight retreating even as the heat of the Alabama summer
persisted. When I arrived at the prison, it was completely dark. Outside the prison entrance
were dozens of men with guns sitting on the backs of trucks that lined the long road to the
prison parking area. They were state troopers, local police officers, deputy sheriffs, and what
appeared to be part of a National Guard unit. I don’t know why the State felt they needed a
militia to guard the entrance to the prison on the night of an execution. It was surreal to see
all of these armed men gathered near midnight to make sure a life would be taken without
incident. It fascinated me that someone thought there might be some violent, armed
resistance to the scheduled execution of an indigent black man.

I entered the prison and saw an older white woman—the correctional officer who managed
the visitation yard. I had become a regular at death row visiting my new clients at least once
a month, so she saw me frequently but had never been particularly friendly. Tonight she
approached me with unusual warmth and familiarity when I arrived. I thought she was going
to hug me.

Men in suits and ties hovered in the lobby, eyeing me suspiciously as I walked into the
visitation room at a little past nine. The visitation area at Holman is a large circular room
surrounded by glass so that officers can look in from any vantage point. There are a dozen
small tables with chairs inside for visiting family who come on visitation days, typically
scheduled two or three times a month. During the week of a scheduled execution, only the
condemned prisoner facing a scheduled death is permitted to have family visits.

When I got inside the visiting room, the family had less than an hour left with Herbert. He
was calmer than I had ever seen him. He smiled at me when I walked in and gave me a hug.

“Hey y’all, this is my lawyer.”

He said it with a pride that was surprising and moving to me.
“Hello everyone,” I said. Herbert still had his arm around my shoulder, and I wanted to say
something comforting but couldn’t think of anything before Herbert jumped in again.
“I told the prison people that I want all my possessions distributed just as I’ve said or my
lawyer will sue you till you all have to work for him.” He chuckled, and people laughed.
I met Herbert’s bride and her family and spent the next forty-five minutes with one eye on
the clock, knowing that at 10:00 P.M. the guards would take Herbert to the back, and we

would never see him alive again. Herbert tried to keep things light. He told his family how he
had persuaded me to take his case and bragged that I only represented people who were
smart and charming.

“He’s too young to have represented me at trial, but if he had been there I wouldn’t be on
death row now.” He said it with a smile, but I was starting to feel shaken. I was really struck
at how hard he was working to make everyone around him feel better in the face of his own
death. I had never seen him so energetic and gracious. His family and I smiled and laughed,
but all of us felt the strain of the moment. His wife became more and more tearful as the
minutes ticked away. Shortly before 10 P.M., the commissioner of the Alabama Department of

Corrections, the warden, and several other men wearing suits gestured to the visitation
officer. She came into the room meekly and regretfully said, “It’s time, folks. We’ve got to end
the visit. Say your goodbyes.”

I watched the men in the hallway; they had clearly been expecting the officer to do
something more decisive and effective. They wanted things to proceed on schedule and were
clearly ready to move to the next stage to prepare for the execution. One of the state officials
walked over to the guard when she left the room and pointed at his watch. Inside the room,
Herbert’s wife began to sob. She put her arms around his neck and refused to let him go.
After a couple of minutes, her crying turned into groaning, distressed and desperate.

The officials in the lobby were growing more impatient and gestured at the visitation
officer, who came back into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said as firmly as she could muster,
“but you have to leave now.” She looked at me, and I looked away. Herbert’s wife began
sobbing again. Her sister and other family members began to cry, too. Herbert’s wife grabbed
him even more tightly. I hadn’t thought about how difficult this moment would be. It was
surreal in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In an instant a flood of sadness and tragedy had
overtaken everyone, and I began to worry that it would be impossible for this family to leave
Herbert.

By now the officials were angry. I looked through the window and saw the warden radio
for more officers to come into the area. Someone else gestured for the officer to go back into
the room and bring the family members out. I heard them tell her not to come out without
the family. The officer looked frantic. Despite her uniform, she’d always seemed a little out of
place at the prison, and she looked especially uncomfortable now. She had once volunteered
to me that her grandson wanted to be a lawyer and that she was hoping he would. She looked
around the room nervously and then came up to me. She had tears in her eyes and looked at
me desperately.

“Please, please, help me get these people out of here, please.” I began to worry that things
were going to get ugly, but I couldn’t sort out what to do. It seemed impossibly hard for them
to expect people to just calmly abandon someone they loved so that he could be executed. I

wanted to prevent things from getting out of control but felt powerless to do anything.
By this time, Herbert’s wife had started saying loudly, “I’m not going to leave you.”

Herbert had made a peculiar request the week before the execution. He said that if he was
executed as scheduled, he wanted me to get the prison to play a recording of a hymn, “The
Old Rugged Cross,” as he walked to the electric chair. I had been slightly embarrassed to raise
the request when I spoke with prison officials, but to my utter amazement they had agreed to
do it.

I remembered as a child that they always sang this hymn at somber moments during
church services, on Communion Sundays, and Good Friday. It was sad like few other hymns
I’d heard. I don’t know why exactly, but I started to hum it as I saw more uniformed officers
enter the vestibule outside the visitation room. It seemed like something that might help. But
help what?

After a few minutes, the family joined me. I went over to Herbert’s wife as she held him
tightly, sobbing softly. I whispered to her, “We have to let him go.” Herbert saw the officers
lining up outside, and he pulled away from her slowly and told me to take her out of the
room.

Herbert’s wife clung to me and sobbed hysterically as I led her out of the visitation room
with her family tearfully following. The experience was heartbreaking, and I wanted to cry.
But I just kept humming instead.

The prison had made arrangements for me to go back to the death chamber in about an
hour to be with Herbert before the execution. Although I had worked on several death
penalty cases with clients who had execution dates, I’d never before been present at an
execution. In the cases where I had actually been counsel for the condemned while I was in
Georgia, we’d always won stays of execution. I grew anxious thinking about witnessing the
spectacle of a man being electrocuted, burned to death in front of me. I’d been so focused on
obtaining the stay and then on what to say to Herbert when I got to the prison that I hadn’t
actually thought about witnessing the execution. I no longer wanted to be there for that, but I
didn’t want to abandon Herbert. To leave him in a room alone with people who wanted him
dead made me realize that I couldn’t back out. All of a sudden the room felt incredibly hot,
like there was no air anywhere. The visitation officer came up to me after I had escorted the
family out and whispered in my ear, “Thank you.” I was vexed by her thinking of me as an
accomplice and didn’t know what to say.

When there were less than thirty minutes before the execution, they took me back to the
cell next to the execution chamber deep inside the prison where they were holding Herbert
until it was time to put him in the electric chair. They had shaved the hair off his body to
facilitate a “clean” execution. The state had done nothing to modify the electric chair since
the disastrous Evans execution. I thought about the botched execution of Horace Dunkins a
month earlier and became even more distraught. I had tried to read up on what should
happen at an execution; I had some misguided thought that I could intervene if they did
something incorrectly.

Herbert was much more emotional when he saw me than he’d been in the visitation room.
He looked shaken, and it was clear that he was upset. It must have been humiliating to be
shaved in preparation for an execution. He looked worried, and when I walked into the

chamber he grabbed my hands and asked if we could pray, and we did. When we were done,
his face took on a distant look and then he turned to me.

“Hey, man, thank you. I know this ain’t easy for you either, but I’m grateful to you for
standing with me.”

I smiled and gave him a hug. His face sagged with an unbearable sadness.
“It’s been a very strange day, Bryan, really strange. Most people who feel fine don’t get to
think all day about this being their last day alive with certainty that they will be killed. It’s
different than being in Vietnam … much stranger.”
He nodded at all the officers who were milling about nervously. “It’s been strange for them,
too.
“All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up
this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came
to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’ This
evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do you need stamps for
your letters?’ ‘Do you want water?’ ‘Do you want coffee?’ ‘Can we get you the phone?’ ‘How
can we help you?’ ”
Herbert sighed and looked away.
“It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in
the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” He
looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion.
I gave Herbert one last long hug, but I was thinking about what he’d said. I thought of all
the evidence that the court had never reviewed about his childhood. I was thinking about all
of the trauma and difficulty that had followed him home from Vietnam. I couldn’t help but
ask myself, Where were these people when he really needed them? Where were all of these
helpful people when Herbert was three and his mother died? Where were they when he was
seven and trying to recover from physical abuse? Where were they when he was a young teen
struggling with drugs and alcohol? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam
traumatized and disabled?
I saw the cassette tape recorder that had been set up in the hallway and watched an officer
bring over a tape. The sad strains of “The Old Rugged Cross” began to play as they pulled
Herbert away from me.

There was a shamefulness about the experience of Herbert’s execution I couldn’t shake.
Everyone I saw at the prison seemed surrounded by a cloud of regret and remorse. The prison
officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and
resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. Maybe I was
imagining it but it seemed that everyone recognized what was taking place was wrong.
Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing
someone who is not a threat are completely different.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the trip home. I thought about Herbert, about how
desperately he wanted the American flag he earned through his military service in Vietnam. I
thought about his family and about the victim’s family and the tragedy the crime created for
them. I thought about the visitation officer, the Department of Corrections officials, the men
who were paid to shave Herbert’s body so that he could be killed more efficiently. I thought

about the officers who had strapped him into the chair. I kept thinking that no one could
actually believe this was a good thing to do or even a necessary thing to do.

The next day there were articles in the press about the execution. Some state officials
expressed happiness and excitement that an execution had taken place, but I knew that none
of them had actually dealt with the details of killing Herbert. In debates about the death
penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane to pay someone to
rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we
were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner
that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I
couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what
killing someone actually involves.

I went back to my office the next day with renewed energy. I picked up my other case files
and made updated plans for how to assist each client to maximize the chance of avoiding an
execution. Eventually, I recognized that all my fresh resolve didn’t change much—I was really
only trying to reconcile myself to the realities of Herbert’s death. I was comforted by the
exercise just the same. I felt more determined to recruit staff and obtain resources to meet the
growing challenges of providing legal assistance to condemned people. Eva and I talked about
a few people who had expressed interest in joining our staff. There was some new financial
support possible from a foundation, and that afternoon we finally received the office
equipment we had ordered. By the end of the day, I was persuaded things would improve,
even while I felt newly burdened by the weight of it all.

Chapter Five

Of the Coming of John

“It would have been so much easier if he had been out in the woods hunting by himself when
that girl was killed.” Armelia Hand, Walter McMillian’s older sister, paused while the crowd
in the small trailer called out in affirmation. I sat on a couch and looked out at the nearly two
dozen family members who were staring at me as Armelia spoke.

“At least then we could understand how it might be possible for him to have done this.”
She paused and looked down at the floor of the room where we had gathered.

“But because we were standing next to him that whole morning … We know where he was.
… We know what he was doing!” People hummed in agreement as her voice grew louder and
more distraught. It was the kind of wordless testimony of struggle and anguish I heard all the
time growing up in a small rural black church.

“Just about everybody in here was standing next to him, talking to him, laughing with him,
eating with him. Then the police come along months later, say he killed somebody miles
away at the same time we were standing next to him. Then they take him away when you
know it’s a lie.”

She was now struggling to speak. Her hands were trembling and the emotion in her voice
was making it hard to get her words out.

“We were with him all day! What are we supposed to do, Mr. Stevenson? Tell us, what are
we supposed to do with that?”

Her faced twisted in pain. “I feel like I’ve been convicted, too.”
The small crowd responded to each statement with shouts of “Yes!” and “That’s right!”
“I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how
to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business,
surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do
and send you to death row?”
I sat on the crowded sofa in my suit, staring into the face of a lot of pain. I hadn’t expected
to have such an intense meeting when I arrived. Folks were desperate for answers and trying
to reconcile themselves to a situation that made no sense. I was struggling to think of
something appropriate to say when a younger woman spoke up.

“Johnny D could have never done this no kind of way, whether we was with him or not,”
she said, using the nickname Walter’s family and friends had given him. “He’s just not like
that.”

The younger woman was Walter’s niece. She continued with her rebuttal to the very idea
that Walter would need an alibi, which seemed to generate support among the crowd.

I was relieved to have the pressure off me for a moment, as Walter’s large family seemed to
be moving toward some sort of debate over whether Walter’s character rendered an alibi
unnecessary—or even insulting. It had been a long day. I was no longer sure what time it
was, but I knew it was very late, and I was wearing down. I’d spent several intense hours on
death row earlier in the day with Walter going over his trial transcript. Before my meeting
with Walter, I spent time with other new clients on the row. Their cases weren’t active, and
there were no deadlines on the horizon, but I hadn’t seen them since the Richardson
execution and they had been anxious to talk.

Now that Walter’s case record was complete, appeal pleadings would be due soon, and time
was critical. I should have returned to Montgomery directly from the prison, but Walter’s
family wanted to meet, and since they were less than an hour from the prison I had promised
to come to Monroeville.

Walter’s wife, Minnie Belle McMillian, and his daughter Jackie were waiting patiently when I
pulled up to the McMillians’ dilapidated house in Repton, which was off the main road
leading into Monroeville. Walter had told me I would know I was close when I passed a
cluster of liquor stores on the county line between Conecuh and Monroe counties. Monroe
County is a “dry county” where no alcoholic beverages can be sold; for the convenience of its
thirsty citizens, several package stores marked the boundary with Conecuh County. Walter’s
house was just a few miles from the county line.

I pulled into the driveway and was surprised at the profound disrepair; this was a poor
family’s home. The front porch was propped on three cinder blocks piled precariously
beneath wood flooring that showed signs of rot. The blue window panes were in desperate
need of paint, and a makeshift set of stairs that didn’t connect to the structure was the only
access to the home. The yard was littered with abandoned car parts, tires, broken pieces of
furniture, and other detritus. Before getting out of my car, I decided to put on my well-worn
suit jacket, even though I had noticed earlier that it was missing buttons on both jacket
sleeves.

Minnie walked out the front door and apologized for the appearance of the yard as I
carefully stepped onto the porch. She kindly invited me inside while a woman in her early
twenties lingered behind her.

“Let me fix something for you to eat. You been at the prison all day,” she said. Minnie
looked tired but otherwise appeared as I had imagined—patient and strong—based on
Walter’s descriptions and my own guesses from our phone conversations. Because the State
had made Walter’s affair with Karen Kelly part of its case in court, the trial had been
especially difficult for Minnie. But she looked like she was still standing strong.

“Oh, no, thank you. I appreciate it, but it’s fine. Walter and I ate some things on the
visitation yard.”

“They don’t have nothing on that prison yard but chips and sodas. Let me cook you

something good.”
“That’s very kind, I appreciate it, but I’m really okay. I know you’ve been working all day,

too.”
“Well, yes, I’m on twelve-hour shifts at the plant. Them people don’t want to hear nothing

about your business, your sickness, your nerves, your out-of-town guests, and definitely
nothing about your family problems.” She didn’t sound angry or bitter, just sad. She walked
over to me, gently looped her arm with mine, and slowly led me into the house. We sat down
on a sofa in the crowded living room. Chairs that didn’t match were piled with papers and
clothes; her grandchildren’s toys were scattered on the floor. Minnie sat close to me, almost
leaning on me as she continued speaking softly.

“Work people tell you to be there, and so you got to go. I’m trying to get her through
school and it ain’t easy.” She nodded to her daughter, Jackie, who looked back at her mother
sympathetically. Jackie walked across the room and sat near us. Walter and Minnie had
mentioned their children—Jackie, Johnny, and “Boot”—to me several times. Jackie’s name
was always followed by “She’s in college.” I had begun to think of her as Jackie “She’s in
College” McMillian. All of the kids were in their twenties but still very close and protective of
their mother.

I told them about my visit with Walter. Minnie hadn’t been to the prison in several months
and seemed grateful that I had spent some time there. I went over the appeals process with
them and talked about the next steps in the case. They confirmed Walter’s alibi and updated
me on all the rumors in town currently circulating about the case.

“I believe it was that old man Miles Jackson who done it,” Minnie said emphatically.
“I think it’s the new owner, Rick Blair,” Jackie said. “Everybody knows they found a white
man’s skin under that girl’s fingernails where she had fought whoever killed her.”
“Well, we’re going to get to the truth,” I said. I tried to sound confident, but given what I’d
read in the trial transcript, I thought it very unlikely that the police would turn over their
evidence to me or let me see the files and the materials collected from the crime scene. Even
in the transcript, the law enforcement officers who had investigated Walter seemed lawless.
These police put Walter on death row while he was a pretrial detainee; I feared that they
would not scrupulously follow the legal requirement to turn over all exculpatory evidence
that could help him prove his innocence.
We talked for well over an hour—or they talked while I listened. You could tell how
traumatizing the last eighteen months since Walter’s arrest had been.
“The trial was the worst,” Minnie said. “They just ignored what we told them about Johnny
D being home. Nobody has explained to me why they did that. Why did they do that?” She
looked at me as if she honestly hoped I could provide an answer.
“This trial was constructed with lies,” I said. I was wary about expressing such strong
opinions to Walter’s family because I hadn’t investigated the case enough to be sure there was
more evidence to convict Walter. But reading the record of his trial had outraged me, and I
felt that anger returning—not just about the injustice done to Walter but also about the way
it had burdened the entire community. Everyone in the poor, black community who talked to
me about the case had expressed hopelessness. This one massive miscarriage of justice had
afflicted the whole community with despair and made it hard for me to be dispassionate.
“One lie after the other,” I continued. “People were fed so many lies that by the time y’all

started telling the truth, it was just easier to believe you were the ones who were lying. It
frustrates me to even read it in the trial record, so I can only imagine how you all feel.”

The phone rang, and Jackie jumped up to answer it. She came back a few minutes later.
“Eddie said that people are getting restless. They want to know when he’s going to be there.”

Minnie stood up and straightened her dress. “Well, we should probably get going down
there. They been waiting most of the day for you.”

When I looked confused, Minnie smiled. “Oh, I told the rest of the family we would bring
you down there, since it’s so hard to find where they live if you’ve never been there before.
His sisters, nephews, nieces, and other folks all want to meet you.” I tried not to show my
alarm, but I was getting worried about the time.

We piled into my two-door Corolla, which was stacked with papers, trial transcripts, and
court records. “You must spend your money on other things,” Jackie joked as we pulled
away.

“Yes, expensive suits are my spending priority these days,” I replied.
“There’s nothing wrong with your suit or your car,” Minnie said protectively.

I followed their directions down a long, winding dirt road full of impossible turns through a
heavily wooded area. As darkness fell around us, the road twisted through dense forest for
several miles until it came to a short, narrow bridge with room for only one car to pass. It
looked shaky and unstable, so I slowed the car to a stop.

“It’s okay. It hasn’t rained that much, and that’s the only time when it’s really a problem,”
Minnie said.

“What kind of problem?” I didn’t want to sound scared, but we were in the middle of
nowhere and in the pitch-black night I couldn’t tell whether it was a swamp, a creek, or a
small river under the bridge.

“It will be all right. People drive through here every day,” Jackie chimed in.
It would have been too embarrassing to turn around, so I drove slowly across the bridge
and was relieved when we had made it to the other side. I continued for another mile until
the forest began to give way to trailers, a few small homes, and finally, an entire community
hidden away in the woods.
We pulled up a hill until we reached a trailer that was glowing in the darkness, lit by a fire
burning in a barrel out front. Six or seven small children were playing outside; they dashed
into the trailer when they saw our car pull up. As we got out of the car, a tall man emerged
from the trailer. He walked up to us and hugged Minnie and Jackie before shaking my hand.
“They been waiting for you,” he told me. “I know you probably got a lot of work to do, but
we appreciate you coming to meet with us. I’m Giles, Walter’s nephew.”
Giles led me to the trailer and opened the door for me to step inside. The small home was
packed with more than thirty people, whose chattering fell silent when I walked in. I was
startled by the size of the group, which stared at me appraisingly and then, one by one,
started to smile at me. Then, to my amazement, the room broke into loud applause. I was
stunned by the gesture. No one had ever applauded me just for showing up. There were older
women, younger women, men Walter’s age, and several men much older. Their faces were
creased with a by-now familiar look of anxiety. When the applause had died down, I began to
speak.

“Thank you, that’s very kind,” I started. “I’m so glad to meet you all. Mr. McMillian told me
he had a large family, but I didn’t expect so many of you to be here. I saw him today, and he
wants me to pass along his thanks and his gratitude to all of you for sticking by him. I hope
you know how much your support means. He has to wake up on death row every morning,
and that’s not easy. But he knows he’s not alone. He talks about you all the time.”

“Sit down, Mr. Stevenson,” someone shouted. I took a seat on an empty couch that seemed
to have been reserved for me and Minnie sat down beside me. Everyone else stood, facing me.

“We don’t have any money. We gave it all to the first lawyer,” called out one of the men.
“I understand that, and I won’t take a penny. I work for a nonprofit law office, and we
provide legal assistance at no cost to the people we represent,” I replied.
“Well, how do you pay the bills?” asked one young woman. People laughed at the question.
“We get donations from foundations and people who support our work.”
“Well, you get Johnny D home, and I’ll make all kinds of donations,” said another woman
slyly. People laughed and I smiled.
An older woman spoke up. It was Armelia Hand. “We don’t have much, Mr. Stevenson, but
you have someone we love in your care. Anything we have, you have. These people have
broken our hearts,” she said.
I began answering questions and listening to comments and testimonials about Walter, the
town, race, the police, the trial, and the way the whole family was now being treated by
people in the community. The hours passed, and I knew that I had probably exhausted
whatever helpful information could be obtained from Walter’s family, but folks still wanted to
talk. There seemed to be therapeutic relief in voicing their concerns to me. Before long I
heard some hopefulness in their questions and comments. I explained the appeals process and
talked about the kind of issues that were already apparent from the record. I began to feel
encouraged that some of the information I provided maybe eased their anxiety. We started to
joke some, and before I knew it I felt embraced in a way that energized me.
An older woman had given me a tall glass of sweet iced tea as I sat there listening and
responding to questions. I drank the first glass thirstily because I was a little nervous (the tea
was very good). The woman watched me drain the glass and smiled at me with a look of
great satisfaction. She quickly filled the glass, and no matter how much or how little I drank,
she minded my glass religiously the entire evening. After over three hours, Minnie grabbed
my hand and announced that they should let me go. It was close to midnight, and it would
take me at least two hours to get to Montgomery. I said my farewells and exchanged hugs
with practically everyone in the room before stepping out into the dark night.
December is rarely bitter cold in South Alabama during the day, but at night the
temperatures can drop, a dramatic reminder that it’s winter, even in the South. Without an
overcoat, I cranked up the heat for the long drive home after dropping Minnie and Jackie
back at their house. The meeting with the family had been inspiring. There were clearly a lot
of people who cared deeply about Walter and consequently cared about what I did and how I
could help. But it was also clear that people had been traumatized by what had happened.
Several of the people I met weren’t actually related but had been at the fish fry on the day of
the crime. They were so deeply disturbed by Walter’s conviction that they, too, had come
over when they heard that I was coming. They needed a place to share their hurt and
confusion.

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois included in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a brilliant
but haunting short story. I thought about “Of the Coming of John” on the drive home. In Du
Bois’s story, a young black man in coastal Georgia is sent off hundreds of miles to a school
that trains black teachers. The entire black community where he was born had raised the
money for his tuition. The community invests in John so that he can one day return and teach
African American children who are barred from attending the public school. Casual and fun-
loving, John almost flunks out of his new school until he considers the trust he’s been given
and the shame he would face if he returned without graduating. Newly focused, sober, and
intensely committed to succeed, he graduates with honors and returns to his community
intent on changing things.

John convinces the white judge who controls the town to allow him to open a school for
black children. His education has empowered him, and he has strong opinions about racial
freedom and equality that land him and the black community in trouble. The judge shuts
down the school when he hears what John’s been teaching. John walks home after the
school’s closing frustrated and distraught. On the trip home he sees his sister being groped by
the judge’s adult son and he reacts violently, striking the man in the head with a piece of
wood. John continues home to say goodbye to his mother. Du Bois ends the tragic story when
the furious judge catches up to John with the lynch mob he has assembled.

I read the story several times in college because I identified with John as the hope of an
entire community. None of my aunts or uncles had graduated from college; many hadn’t
graduated from high school. The people in my church always encouraged me and never asked
me for anything back, but I felt a debt accumulating. Du Bois understood this dynamic deeply
and brought it to life in a way that absolutely fascinated me. (I just hoped that my parallel
with John wouldn’t extend to the getting lynched part.)

Driving home that night from meeting Walter’s family, I thought of the story in a whole
new way. I had never before considered how devastated John’s community must have felt
after his lynching. Things would become so much harder for the people who had given
everything to help make John a teacher. For the surviving black community, there would be
more obstacles to opportunity and progress and much heartache. John’s education had led
not to liberation and progress but to violence and tragedy. There would be more distrust,
more animosity, and more injustice.

Walter’s family and most poor black people in his community were similarly burdened by
Walter’s conviction. Even if they hadn’t been at his house the day of the crime, most black
people in Monroeville knew someone who had been with Walter that day. The pain in that
trailer was tangible—I could feel it. The community seemed desperate for some hope of
justice. The realization left me anxious but determined.

I’d gotten used to taking calls from lots of people concerning Walter’s case. Most were poor
and black, and they offered encouragement and support, and my visit with the family
generated even more of those calls. And occasionally, a white person for whom Walter had
worked would call to offer support, like Sam Crook. When Sam called, he insisted that I come
and see him the next time I was back in town.

“I’m a rebel,” he said toward the end of our call. “Part of the 117th division of the
Confederate Army.”

“Sir?”
“My people were heroes of the Confederacy. I’ve inherited their land, their title, and their
pride. I love this county, but I know what happened to Walter McMillian ain’t right.”
“Well, I appreciate your call.”
“You’re going to need some backup, someone who knows some of these people you’re
going against, and I’m going to help you.”
“I’d be very grateful for your help.”
“I’ll tell you something else.” He lowered his voice. “Do you think your phone is being
tapped?”
“No, sir, I think my phone is clear.”
Sam’s voice rose in volume again.
“Well, I’ve decided I ain’t going to let them string him up. I’ll get some boys, and we’ll go
cut him down before we let them take him. I’m just not going to stand for them putting a
good man down for something I know he didn’t do.”
Sam Crook spoke in grand proclamations. I hesitated over how to respond.
“Well … thank you,” was all I could manage.
When I later asked Walter about Sam Crook, he just smiled. “I’ve done a lot of work for
him. He’s been good to me. He’s a very interesting guy.”
I saw Walter just about every other week for those first few months, and I learned some of
his habits. “Interesting” was Walter’s euphemism for odd people, and having worked for
hundreds of people throughout the county over the years, he’d encountered no shortage of
“interesting” people. The more unusual or bizarre the person was, the more “interesting” they
would become in Walter’s parlance. “Very interesting” and “real interesting” and finally
“Now, he’s reeeeaaaalll interesting” were the markers for strange and stranger characters.
Walter seemed reluctant to say anything bad about anyone. He’d just chuckle if he thought
someone was odd.
Walter grew much more relaxed during our visits. As we became more comfortable with
each other, he would sometimes veer into topics that had nothing to do with the case. We
talked about the guards at the prison and his experiences dealing with other prisoners. He
talked about people back home he thought would visit but hadn’t. In these conversations,
Walter showed remarkable empathy. He spent a lot of time imagining what other people were
thinking and feeling that might mitigate their behavior. He guessed what frustrations guards
must be experiencing to excuse the rude things they said to him. He gave voice to how hard it
must be to visit someone on death row.
We talked about food he liked, jobs he’d worked when he was younger. We talked about
race and power, the things we saw that were funny, and the things we saw that were sad. It
made him feel better to have a normal conversation with someone who wasn’t on the row or
a guard, and I always spent extra time with him to talk about things unrelated to the case.
Not just for him but for myself as well.
I was trying so hard to get the project off the ground that my work had quickly become my
life. I found something refreshing in the moments I spent with clients when we didn’t relate
to one another as attorney and client but as friends. Walter’s case was becoming the most
complicated and time-consuming I’d ever worked on, and spending time with him was
comforting even though it made me feel the pressure of his mistreatment in ways that became

increasingly personal.
“Man, all these guys talk about how you’re working on their case. You must not ever get

any peace,” he told me once.
“Well, everybody needs help, so we’re trying.”
He gave me an odd look that I hadn’t seen before. I think he wasn’t sure whether he could

give me advice—he hadn’t done that yet. Finally, he seemed to say what he was thinking.
“Well, you know you can’t help everybody,” he looked at me earnestly. “You’ll kill yourself

if you try to do that.” He continued looking at me with concern.
I smiled. “I know.”
“I mean, you gotta help me. You shouldn’t hold nothing back on my case,” he said with a

smile. “I expect you to fight all comers to get me out of here. Take ’em all down, if
necessary.”

“Stand up to giants, slay wild beasts, wrestle alligators …,” I joked.
“Yeah, and get somebody ready to take over the battle in case they chop your head off,
’cause I’m still going to need help if they take you out.”
The more time I spent with Walter, the more I was persuaded that he was a kind, decent
man with a generous nature. He freely acknowledged that he’d made poor decisions,
particularly where women were concerned. By all accounts—from friends, family, and
associates like Sam Crook—Walter generally tried to do the right thing. I never regarded our
time together as wasted or unproductive.
In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of
clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation and deal with the
stress of a potential execution; it’s also key to effective advocacy. A client’s life often depends
on his lawyer’s ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions
or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone’s background that no one has
previously discovered—things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important—
requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse,
neglect, or abandonment won’t happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and
multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the
client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes
effective work possible. But it also creates genuine connections with clients. And that’s
certainly what happened with Walter.

Shortly after my first trip to see Walter’s family, I received a call from a young man named
Darnell Houston who told me that he could prove that Walter was innocent. His voice shook
with nerves but he was determined to speak to me. He didn’t want to talk on the phone, so I
drove down to meet with him one afternoon. He lived in a rural part of Monroe County on
farmland that his family had worked since the time of slavery. Darnell was a sincere young
man, and I could tell he’d been debating for a while whether to contact me.

When I arrived at his home, he walked out to greet me. He was a young black man in his
twenties who had joined the “Jheri curl” craze. I had already noticed that the popular process
of chemically treating black hair to make it looser and easier to style had come to
Monroeville; I’d seen several black men, young and old, sporting the look with pride. The
cheerful bounce of Darnell’s hair contrasted with his worried demeanor. As soon as we sat

down, he got right to business.
“Mr. Stevenson,” he began. “I can prove that Walter McMillian is innocent.”
“Really?”
“Bill Hooks is lying. I didn’t know he was even involved in that case until they told me he

was part of how they put Walter McMillian on death row. First, I didn’t believe Bill could
have been part of this, but then I found out that he testified that he drove by that cleaners on
the day that girl was killed, and that’s a lie.”

“How do you know?”
“We were working together all that day. We both worked at the NAPA auto parts store last
November. I remember that Saturday when that girl was killed because ambulances and
police started racing up the street. It went on for like thirty minutes. I’d been working in town
for a couple of years and had never seen anything like it.”
“You were working on the Saturday morning that Ronda Morrison was killed?”
“Yes, sir, with Bill Hooks from about eight in the morning till we closed after lunch, after
all them ambulances went by our shop. It was probably close to eleven when the sirens
started. Bill was working on a car in the shop with me. There ain’t but one way out the store;
he never left the entire morning. If he said he drove by the cleaners when that girl was killed,
he’s lying.”
One of the most frustrating things about reading Walter’s trial record had been that the
State’s witnesses—Ralph Myers, Bill Hooks, and Joe Hightower—were so obviously not
believable. Their testimony was laughably inconsistent and completely lacking in credibility.
Myers’s account of his role in the crime—Walter kidnapping him to drive him to the crime
scene and then dropping him off afterward—never made any sense. Hooks, a critical witness
against McMillian, wasn’t persuasive or reliable in the transcript—he just repeated the same
story he’d given the police about driving by the cleaners at the time of the crime. His
response to every line of questioning was to repeat over and over again that he saw Walter
McMillian walk out of the store with a bag, get into his “low-rider” truck, and get driven
away by a white man. He could not answer any of Chestnut’s questions about what else he
saw that day or what he was doing in the area. He just kept repeating that he saw McMillian
at the cleaners. But the state needed Hooks’s testimony.
My plan had been to immediately appeal Walter’s conviction to the Alabama Court of
Criminal Appeals. The State had done so little to prove Walter’s guilt that there weren’t a lot
of legal issues to appeal, but the evidence against him was so unpersuasive that I was hopeful
the court might overturn the conviction simply because it was so unreliable. Once the case
was on direct appeal, no new evidence would be considered. The time for filing a motion for
a new trial in the trial court—the last chance to introduce new facts before an appeal begins
—had already expired. Chestnut and Boynton, Walter’s lawyers for the initial trial, had filed a
motion before withdrawing, and Judge Key had quickly denied it. Darnell said he told
Walter’s former lawyers what he told me and they had raised it in the motion for a new trial,
but no one took it seriously.
In capital cases, a motion for a new trial is routinely filed but rarely granted. But if the
defendant alleges new evidence that could lead to a different outcome in the case—or that
undermines the reliability of the trial—there is typically a hearing. After speaking with
Darnell, I thought about refiling his assertions before the case went up on appeal and maybe,

just maybe, we could persuade local officials to retreat from the case against Walter. I made a
motion to reconsider the denial of a new trial for Mr. McMillian. I immediately got an
affidavit from Darnell stating that Hooks’s testimony was a lie. I took the risk of talking to a
few local lawyers about whether the new prosecutor might acknowledge that the conviction
was unreliable and support a new trial if there was compelling new evidence.

Several people had suggested that Tom Chapman, the new Monroe County district attorney
and a former criminal defense attorney, would be fairer and more sympathetic to someone
wrongly convicted than lifelong prosecutor Ted Pearson. After Pearson’s long tenure as D.A.,
Chapman’s election represented something of a new era. He was in his forties and had talked
about modernizing law enforcement in the region. Some said that he was ambitious and
might want to run for statewide office someday. I also discovered that he had represented
Karen Kelly in a prior proceeding, which told me that he was already familiar with the case. I
was hopeful.

I was still sorting out how to proceed when Darnell called me at my office.
“Mr. Stevenson, you have to help. They arrested me this morning and took me to the jail. I
just got out on bond.”
“What?”
“I asked them what I had done. They told me I was being charged with perjury.” He
sounded terrified.
“Perjury? Based on what you told Mr. McMillian’s lawyers a year ago? Have they come to
interview you or talk to you since we got your statement? You were supposed to let me know
if you heard from them.”
“No, sir. I haven’t heard from any of them. They just came and arrested me and told me I
had been indicted for perjury.”
I hung up with Darnell, shocked and furious. It was unheard of to indict someone for
perjury without any investigation or compelling evidence to establish that a false statement
had been made. Police and prosecuters had found out that Darnell was talking to us and they
decided to punish him for it.
A few days later, I called the new D.A. to set up a meeting.
On my way to his office, I decided to give him a chance to explain what was going on,
instead of angrily complaining about the insanity of indicting someone for perjury because he
had contradicted a State’s witness. I decided to wait until after my meeting before filing my
stack of motions. This was my first meeting with anyone associated with Walter’s prosecution,
and I didn’t want to begin with an angry accusation. I had allowed myself to believe that the
people who had prosecuted Walter were just misguided, possibly incompetent. I knew some
of them were bigoted and abusive, but I guess I held out the hope that they could be
reoriented. Indicting Darnell was a worrisome signal that they were willing to threaten and
intimidate people.
The Monroe County courthouse is situated in the heart of downtown Monroeville. I drove
into town, parked, and entered the courthouse looking for the district attorney’s office. On my
only other trip to the courthouse a month earlier, I had gone to the clerk’s office to pick up
files and the staff had asked me where I was from. When I said Montgomery, they launched
into a lecture about Monroeville’s prominence as a result of Harper Lee and her famous novel.
I remember how the clerk had chatted me up.

“Have you read the book? It’s a wonderful story. This is a famous place. They made the old
courthouse a museum, and when they made the movie Gregory Peck came here. You should
go over there and stand where Mr. Peck stood—I mean, where Atticus Finch stood.”

She giggled with excitement, although I imagine she said the same thing to every out-of-
town attorney who wandered in. She continued talking enthusiastically about the story until I
promised to visit the museum as soon as I could. I refrained from explaining that I was too
busy working on the case of an innocent black man the community was trying to execute
after a racially biased prosecution.

During this trip I was in a different frame of mind. The last thing I was interested in was a
fictional story about justice. I walked through the courthouse until I found the district
attorney’s office. I announced myself to the secretary, who eyed me suspiciously before
directing me into Chapman’s office. He walked over to shake my hand.

Chapman started off by saying, “Mr. Stevenson, lots of people want to meet you. I told
them you were coming down but decided that just you and I should talk.” It didn’t surprise
me that word had gotten around and that people were talking about Walter’s new attorney. I
had talked to enough people in the community to know that people would be discussing my
efforts on Walter’s behalf. My guess is that Judge Key had already characterized me as
misguided and uncooperative simply because I didn’t get off the case, as he had directed.

Chapman had a medium build, curly hair, and glasses that suggested he didn’t mind
looking like someone who spent time reading and studying. I’d met prosecutors who dressed
and presented like they would rather be out hunting ducks than running a law office, but
Chapman was professional and courteous and approached me with a pleasant demeanor. I
was intrigued that he would immediately give voice to the concerns of other people in law
enforcement and was initially encouraged that he meant for us to have a candid conversation
free of distractions and posturing.

“Well, I appreciate that,” I said. “I’m very concerned about this McMillian case. I’ve read
the record, and to be honest I have serious doubts about his guilt and the reliability of this
conviction.”

“Well, this was a big case, there’s no doubt about that. You do understand that I didn’t
have anything to do with the prosecution, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”
“This was one of the most outrageous crimes in Monroe County history, and your client
made a lot of people here extremely angry. People are still angry, Mr. Stevenson. There’s not
enough bad that can happen to Walter McMillian for some of them.”
This was a disappointing beginning—he seemed completely convinced of Walter’s guilt. But
I pressed on.
“Well, it was an outrageous, tragic crime, so anger is understandable,” I replied. “But it
doesn’t accomplish anything to convict the wrong person. Whether Mr. McMillian has done
anything wrong is what the trial should resolve. If the trial is unfair, or if witnesses have
given false testimony, then we can’t really know whether he’s guilty or not.”
“Well, you may be the only person right now who thinks the trial was unfair. Like I said, I
wasn’t involved in the prosecution.”
I was becoming frustrated, and Chapman probably saw me shift in my seat. I thought about
the dozens of black people I’d met who had complained bitterly about Walter’s prosecution,

and I was starting to see Chapman as either naive or willfully indifferent—or worse. I tried
unsuccessfully not to let my disappointment show.

“I’m not the only person with questions about this case, Mr. Chapman. There’s a whole
community of people, some of whom claim to have been with Walter McMillian miles away
when the crime was committed, who believe in his innocence. There are people for whom
he’s worked who are absolutely convinced that he did not commit this crime.”

“I’ve talked to some of those people,” Chapman responded, “and they can only have
uninformed opinions. They don’t have facts. Look, I can tell you right now that nobody cares
who slept with Karen Kelly. There is evidence that implicates Walter McMillian for this
murder, and my job is to defend this conviction.” He was becoming more argumentative, and
his voice was rising. The calm and curious look he had initially given me was shifting into
anger and disgust.

“Well, you’ve indicted someone for perjury for contradicting the state’s case. Do you intend
to prosecute everyone who challenges the evidence in this case?”

My voice was now rising in exactly the way I wanted to avoid, but I was provoked by his
attitude. “Alabama case law is clear that a perjury charge can’t be filed in the absence of clear
and convincing evidence that a false statement has been made,” I went on. “A perjury
indictment seems like a tactic designed to intimidate and discourage people from coming
forward with evidence that contradicts the State’s case. The charge against Mr. Houston
seems really inappropriate, Mr. Chapman, and legally indefensible.”

I knew I was lecturing him and knew he didn’t like it, but I wanted him to know that we
were going to defend Walter in a serious way.

“Are you representing Darnell Houston now, too?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, I’m not sure you can do that, Mr. Stevenson. I think you might have a conflict
there,” he said, and then his voice shifted from argumentative to blandly matter-of-fact. “But
don’t worry, I may drop the perjury charges against Houston. Now that the judge has denied
your motion to reopen the case, I don’t have any interest in pursuing charges against Darnell
Houston. But I do want people to know that if they make false statements concerning this
case, they are going to be held accountable.”
I was confused and a little stunned.
“What are you talking about? The motion to reconsider has been denied?”
“Yes, the judge has already denied your motion. You must not have gotten your copy of his
order. He’s down in Mobile now, so sometimes there are mail issues.”
I tried to conceal my surprise about the court’s ruling on the motion without even
permitting a hearing. I asked, “So you have no interest in investigating what Darnell Houston
is saying about the possibility that the State’s main witness may be lying?”
“Ralph Myers is the State’s main witness.”
It was clear that Chapman had looked more deeply into the case than he had initially
claimed.
“Without Hooks’s testimony, the conviction wouldn’t be valid,” I said, leveling my voice.
“Under the State’s theory, Myers is an accomplice, and state law requires confirmation of
accomplice testimony, which can only come from Hooks. Mr. Houston says that Hooks is
lying, which makes his testimony a critical issue that should be heard in court.”

I knew I was right. The law was as clear as it possibly could be on this question. But I also
knew that I was talking to someone who didn’t care what the law said. I knew that what I
was saying wouldn’t persuade Chapman, but I felt the need to say it anyway.

Chapman stood up. I could tell he was annoyed by my lecturing and legal arguments, and I
was pretty sure he thought I was being pushy. “That sounds like an issue you’ll need to raise
on appeal, Mr. Stevenson. You can tell Mr. Houston that the charges against him are being
dropped. I can do that for y’all, but that’s about it.”

His tone was dismissive, and when he turned his back to me I knew he’d ended the meeting
and was now eager to get me out of his office.

I left his office extremely frustrated. Chapman had not been unfriendly or hostile. Yet his
indifference to McMillian’s innocence claim was hard for me to accept. Reading the record
had shown me that there were people who were willing to ignore evidence, logic, and
common sense to convict someone and reassure the community that the crime had been
solved and the murderer punished. But talking face-to-face with someone about the case
made the irrational thinking swirling around Walter’s conviction much, much harder to
accept.

Chapman hadn’t prosecuted the case, and I had hoped that he might not want to defend
something so unreliable, but it was clear that he was locked into this narrative just like
everyone else who had been involved. I’d seen the abuse of power in many cases before, but
there was something especially upsetting about it here, where not only a single defendant was
being victimized but an entire community as well. I filed my stack of motions just to make
sure that if they didn’t dismiss the charges they knew we would fight them. Walking down
the hallway to my car I saw yet another flyer about the next production of To Kill a
Mockingbird, which just added to my outrage.

Darnell had remained home after he posted bond. I stopped by his house to discuss my
meeting with the D.A. He was thrilled to hear that the charges against him would be dropped,
but he was still shaken by the whole experience. I explained that what the State had done to
him was illegal and that we could pursue a civil action against them, but he had no interest in
that. I didn’t actually think a civil suit was a good idea since it would just leave him
vulnerable to more harassment, but I didn’t want him to think I was unwilling to fight on his
behalf.

“Mr. Stevenson, all I wanted to do is tell the truth. I can’t go to jail, and I’ll be honest—
these folks have scared me.”

“I understand,” I said, “but what they did is illegal and I want you to know you have done
nothing wrong. They’re the ones who have acted very, very inappropriately. They’re trying to
intimidate you.”

“Well, it’s working. What I told you is true, and I stand by it. But I can’t have these folks
coming after me.”

“Well, the judge has denied our motion, so you don’t have to testify or come to court at this
point. Let me know if you have any more problems with them or if they come to speak with
you about this. You can tell people that I’m your lawyer and refer them to me, okay?”

“Yes, okay. But does that mean you are my lawyer?”
“Yes, I’ll represent you if anyone creates any issues behind what you’ve disclosed.” He

looked a little relieved but was still pretty rattled when I left.
I got in my car with the sinking realization that if everyone who tried to help us on this

case was going to be threatened, it would be very difficult to prove Walter’s innocence. If his
case wasn’t overturned on direct appeal, we’d have a chance to file a postconviction petition
later, and we would need new evidence, new witnesses, and new facts to prove Walter’s
innocence. Based on the experience with Darnell, this would be extremely challenging. I
decided not to worry about it now and turned my attention to the appeal. With the
reconsideration denied, the appeal brief was due in twenty-eight days. I wasn’t even sure how
much time had elapsed since the judge’s ruling, as I had never received the order.

I left for home frustrated and worried. On my drives between Monroeville and
Montgomery, I had gotten used to looking at the rural farmland, the cotton fields, and the
hilly countryside; I would think about what life here must have been like decades ago. This
time I didn’t have to imagine it. Darnell’s despair, his sadness in recognizing that they could
do whatever they wanted to him with impunity, was utterly disheartening. From what I could
see, there simply was no commitment to the rule of law, no accountability, and little shame.
Arresting someone for coming forward with credible evidence that challenged the reliability
of a capital murder conviction? The more I thought about it, the more disoriented and
provoked I became. It was also sobering. If they arrested people who said things that were
inconvenient, how would they react if I challenged them even harder?

As I left town, I watched the sun set and darkness descend across the county landscape as it
had for centuries. People would be heading home now, some to very comfortable houses
where they could relax easily, secure and proud of their community. Others, people like
Darnell and Walter’s family, would be returning to less comfortable homes. They would not
rest as easily, nor would there be much thought of community pride. For them the darkness
brought a familiar unease, an uncertainty weighted with a wary, lingering fear as old as the
settlement of the county itself; discomfort too longstanding and constant to merit discussion
but too burdensome to ever forget. I drove away as quickly as I could.

Chapter Six

Surely Doomed

“He’s just a little boy.”
It was late, and I had picked up the phone after hours because no one else was in the

building; it was becoming a bad habit. The older woman on the other end of the line was
pleading with me after offering a heartfelt description of her grandson, who had just been
jailed for murder.

“He’s already been in the jail for two nights, and I can’t get to him. I’m in Virginia, and my
health is not good. Please tell me you’ll do something.”

I hesitated before answering her. Only a handful of countries permitted the death penalty
for children—and the United States was one of them. Many of my Alabama clients were on
death row for crimes they were accused of committing when they were sixteen- or seventeen-
year-old children. Many states had changed their laws to make it easier to prosecute children
as adults, and my clients were getting younger and younger. Alabama had more juveniles
sentenced to death per capita than any other state—or any other country in the world. I was
determined to manage the growing demand for our services by taking on new cases only if
the client was facing execution or formally condemned to death row.

This woman had told me that her grandson was only fourteen. While the Supreme Court
had upheld the death penalty for juveniles in a 1989 ruling, a year earlier the Court had
barred the death penalty for children under the age of fifteen. Whatever perils this child
faced, he was not going to be sent to death row. This lady’s grandson might be facing life
imprisonment without parole, but given the overwhelming number of death penalty cases on
our docket, I couldn’t rationalize taking on his case.

As I considered how to answer this woman’s plea, she started speaking quickly, at a
whisper: “Lord, please help us. Lead this man and protect us from any choice that is not
yours. Help me find the words, Lord. Tell me what to say, Lord—”

I didn’t want to interrupt her prayer, so I waited until she finished.
“Ma’am, I can’t take the case, but I will drive down to the jail and see your grandson
tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do. We likely won’t be able to represent him, but let me find out
what’s going on, and perhaps we can help you find a lawyer who can assist you.”

“Mr. Stevenson, I’m so grateful.”
I was tired and already feeling overwhelmed with the cases I had. And cases with juveniles
took an especially severe emotional toll on everyone who touched them. But I needed to go to
a courthouse near the county where this boy was being held, so it wouldn’t be that big a deal
to stop by and see the child.
The next morning I drove for over an hour to the county. When I got to the courthouse, I
checked the clerk’s file on the case and found a lengthy incident report. Because I was an
attorney investigating the case on behalf of the family, the clerk let me read the file, although
she wouldn’t make a copy or let me take it out of the office because it involved a minor. The
clerk’s office was small, but it wasn’t especially busy, so I sat down on an uncomfortable
metal chair in a cramped corner of the room to read the statement, which mostly confirmed
everything the grandmother had told me.
Charlie was fourteen years old. He weighed less than 100 pounds and was just five feet tall.
He didn’t have any juvenile criminal history—no prior arrests, no misconduct in school, no
delinquencies or prior court appearances. He was a good student who had earned several
certificates for perfect attendance at his school. His mother described him as a “great kid”
who always did what she asked. But Charlie had, by his own account, shot and killed a man
named George.

George was Charlie’s mother’s boyfriend. She referred to their relationship as a “mistake.”
George would often come home drunk and begin acting violently. There were three occasions
in the year and a half leading up to the night of the shooting when George beat Charlie’s
mother so mercilessly that she required medical treatment. She never left George or made
him leave, even though she told several people that she knew she should.

On the night of the shooting, George had come home very drunk. Charlie and his mother
were playing cards when he arrived. He entered the house shouting, “Hey, where are you?”
Charlie’s mother followed his voice to the kitchen, where she let him know that she and
Charlie were home playing cards. The two adults had argued earlier in the evening because
she had begged him not to go out, fearing that he would come home drunk. Now she looked
at him angrily when she saw him standing there, reeking of alcohol. He looked back at her,
mirroring her contempt and disgust, and in a flash, he punched her hard in the face. She
didn’t expect him to hit her so quickly or violently—he hadn’t done it like that before. She
collapsed to the floor with the crush of his blow.

Charlie was standing behind his mother and saw her head slam against their metal kitchen
counter as she fell. George saw Charlie standing there and glared at him coldly before
brushing past him toward the bedroom, where Charlie heard him fall noisily onto the bed.
Charlie’s mother was lying on the floor, unconscious and bleeding badly. He knelt by his
mother’s side and tried to stop the bleeding. There was some blood on her face, but it poured
from an ugly cut on the back of her head. Charlie tried feverishly to revive her. He started
crying, futilely asking his mother what to do. He got up and put paper towels behind her
head but couldn’t stop the bleeding. He frantically searched for the cloth kitchen towel
because he thought that would work better and found it wrapped around a pot on the stove.
His mother had cooked black-eyed peas for dinner; he loved black-eyed peas. They’d eaten
together before they’d started playing pinochle, his favorite card game.

Charlie replaced the paper towels with the cloth towel and panicked all over again when he
saw how much blood there was. He was quietly begging his mother to wake up when it
appeared to him that she wasn’t breathing. He thought he should call an ambulance, but the
phone was in the bedroom with George. George had never hit Charlie, but he terrified him
just the same. As a younger child, whenever Charlie got very scared or anxious, he would
sometimes start trembling and shaking. The shaking would almost always be followed by a
nosebleed.

Sitting on the kitchen floor with his mother’s blood all around him, Charlie could feel
himself starting to tremble, and within seconds the blood slowly began to trickle out of his
nose. His mother would always run to get something to help with his nosebleeds, but now she
just lay on the floor. He wiped the blood from his nose and focused on the fact that he had to
do something. His trembling stopped. His mother hadn’t moved in nearly fifteen minutes. The
house was quiet. The only sound he heard was George breathing heavily in the other room;
soon he could hear him snoring.

Charlie had been slowly stroking his mother’s hair, desperately hoping that she would open
her eyes. The blood from her head had saturated the towel and was spreading onto Charlie’s
pants. Charlie thought his mother might be dying or was maybe even already dead. He had to
call an ambulance. He stood up, flooded with anxiety, and cautiously made his way to the
bedroom. Charlie saw George on the bed asleep and felt a surge of hatred for this man. He
had never liked him, never understood why his mother had let him live with them. George
didn’t like Charlie, either; he was rarely friendly to the boy. Even when he wasn’t drunk,
George seemed angry all the time. His mother had told Charlie that George could be sweet,
but Charlie never saw any of that. Charlie knew that George’s first wife and child had been
killed in a car accident and that was why Charlie’s mom said he drank so much. In the
eighteen months that George lived with them, it seemed to Charlie that there had been
nothing but violence, loud arguments, pushing and shoving, threats, and turmoil. His mother
had stopped smiling the way she used to; she’d become nervous and jumpy, and now, he
thought, she’s on the kitchen floor, dead.

Charlie walked to the dresser against the back wall of the bedroom to reach the phone. He
had called 911 a year earlier, after George had hit his mom, but she had directed him to do so
and told him what to say. When he reached the phone, he wasn’t sure why he didn’t just pick
up the receiver. He could never really explain why he opened the dresser drawer instead, put
his hand under the folded white T-shirts his mom had laundered, and felt for the handgun he
knew George kept hidden there. He’d found it there when George had said Charlie could wear
an Auburn University T-shirt someone had given him. It was way too small for George and
way too big for Charlie, but he’d been grateful to have it; it had been one of George’s few
kind gestures. This time he didn’t pull his hand back in fear as he had before. He picked up
the gun. He’d never fired a gun before, but he knew he could do it.

George was now snoring rhythmically.
Charlie walked over to the bed, his arms stretched out, pointing the gun at George’s head.
As Charlie hovered over him, the snoring stopped. The room grew very, very quiet. And that’s
when Charlie pulled the trigger.
The sound of the bullet firing was much louder than Charlie had expected. The gun jerked
and pushed Charlie a step back; he almost lost his balance and fell. He looked at George and

squeezed his eyes closed; it was horrible. He could feel himself starting to tremble again, and
that’s when he heard his mother moaning in the kitchen. He couldn’t believe she was alive.
He ran back to the phone and called 911, then sat next to his mother until the police arrived.

After learning all of this, I was positive they would not prosecute Charlie as an adult. I
continued to read the file and the notes from the initial court appearance. The prosecutor did
not dispute the account that Charlie and his mother had given. It was only when I continued
reading that I discovered that George was a local police officer. The prosecutor made a long
argument about what a great man George had been and how upsetting his death had been for
everyone in the community. “George was a law enforcement officer who served with honor,”
the prosecutor argued. “It is a great loss for the county and a tragedy that a good person
could be so heartlessly killed by this young man.” The prosecutor insisted that Charlie be
tried as an adult, and he announced that he intended to seek the maximum punishment
permitted by law. The judge agreed that this was capital murder and that the boy should be
tried as an adult. Charlie was immediately taken to the county jail for adults.

The small county jail was across the street from the courthouse. Like many Southern
communities, the courthouse anchored the square that marked the town center. I stepped
outside and walked across the street to the jail to see this young man. The jailers clearly
didn’t receive a lot of out-of-town lawyers for legal visits. The deputy on duty looked at me
suspiciously before taking me into the jail, where I sat in the small attorney meeting room
waiting for Charlie. From the time I finished reading the file, I couldn’t stop thinking about
how tragic this case was—and my somber thoughts weren’t interrupted until a small child
was pushed into the visiting room. This boy seemed way too short, way too thin, and way too
scared to be fourteen. I looked at the jailer, who seemed to share my surprise at how small
and terrified the child appeared. I asked them to remove the handcuffs. Sometimes in jails
like this, the guards resist uncuffing clients, arguing that it’s not safe or permitted to take the
handcuffs off a suspect during a legal visit. They worry that if a person gets upset or becomes
violent, being uncuffed will make him or her harder to subdue.

This guard didn’t hesitate to take the handcuffs off this child before leaving the room.
We were sitting at a wooden table that was probably four by six feet. Charlie was on one
side of the table, and I was on the other. It had been three days since his arrest.
“Charlie, my name is Bryan. Your grandmother called me and asked me if I would come
and see you. I’m a lawyer, and I help people who get in trouble or who are accused of crimes,
and I’d like to help you.”
The boy wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He was tiny, but he had big, beautiful eyes.
He had a close haircut that was common for little boys because it required no maintenance. It
made him look even younger than he was. I thought I saw tattoos or symbols on his neck, but
when I looked more closely, I realized that they were bruises.
“Charlie, are you okay?”
He was staring intensely to my left, looking at the wall as if he saw something there. His
distant look was so alarming that I actually turned to see if there was something of interest
behind me, but it was just a blank wall. The disconnected look, the sadness in his face, and
his complete lack of engagement—qualities he shared with a lot of the other teenagers I’d
worked with—were the only things that made me believe he was fourteen. I sat and waited

for a very long time in the hope that he would give me some kind of response, but the room
remained silent. He stared at the wall and then looked down at his own wrists. He wrapped
his right hand around his left wrist where the handcuffs had been and rubbed the spot where
the metal had pinched him.

“Charlie, I want to make sure you’re doing okay, so I just need you to answer a few
questions for me, okay?” I knew he could hear me; whenever I spoke, he would lift his head
and return his gaze to the spot on the wall.

“Charlie, if I were you, I’d be pretty scared and really worried right now, but I’d also want
someone to help me. I’d like to help, okay?” I waited for a response, but none was
forthcoming.

“Charlie, can you speak? Are you okay?” He stared at the wall when I spoke and then back
at his wrists when I was finished, but he didn’t say a word.

“We don’t have to talk about George. We don’t have to talk about what happened; we can
talk about whatever you want. Is there something you want to talk about?” I was waiting for
longer and longer stretches after each question, desperately hoping that he would say
something, but he didn’t.

“Do you want to talk about your mom? She’s going to be fine. I’ve checked, and even
though she can’t visit you, she’s going to be fine. She’s worried about you.”

I thought talking about his mother would spark something in Charlie’s eyes. When it didn’t,
I became even more concerned about the child.

I noticed that there was a second chair on Charlie’s side of the table, and I realized that
lawyers were apparently supposed to sit on that side and the clients on the side I chose,
where there was only one chair. I’d sat in the wrong place.

I lowered my voice and spoke more softly, “Charlie, you’ve got to talk to me. I can’t help
you if you don’t. Would you just say your name—say something, please?” He continued to
stare at the wall. I waited and then stood up and walked around the table. He didn’t look at
me as I moved but returned his gaze to his wrist. I sat in the chair next to him, leaned close,
and said quietly, “Charlie, I’m really sorry if you’re upset, but please talk to me. I can’t help
you if you don’t talk to me.” He leaned back in his chair for the first time, nearly placing his
head on the wall behind us. I pulled my chair closer to him and leaned back in mine. We sat
silently for a long time and then I started saying silly things, because I didn’t know what else
to do.

“Well, you won’t tell me what you’re thinking, so I guess I’m going to just have to tell you
what I’m thinking. I bet you think you know what I’m thinking,” I said playfully, “but in fact
you really couldn’t possibly imagine. You probably think I’m thinking about the law, or the
judge, or the po-lice, or why won’t this young man speak with me. But what I’m actually
thinking about is food. Yes, that’s right, Charlie,” I continued teasingly, “I’m thinking about
fried chicken and collard greens cooked with turkey meat and sweet potato biscuits.… You
ever had a sweet potato biscuit?”

Nothing.
“You’ve probably never had a sweet potato biscuit, and that’s a shame.”
Still nothing. I kept going.
“I’m thinking about getting a new car because my car is so old.” I waited. Nothing.
“Charlie, you’re supposed to say, ‘How old is it, Bryan?’ and then I say my car is so old—”

He never smiled or responded; he just continued looking at the spot on the wall, his face
frozen in sadness.

“What kind of car do you think I should get?” I went through a range of ridiculous musings
that yielded nothing from Charlie. He continued to lean back, and his body seemed a little
less tense. I noticed that our shoulders were now touching.

After a while I tried again. “Come on, Charlie, what’s going on? You’ve got to talk to me,
son.” I started leaning on him somewhat playfully, until he sat forward a bit, and then I
finally felt him lean back into me. I took a chance and put my arm around him, and he
immediately began to shake. His trembling intensified before he finally leaned completely
into me and started crying. I put my head to his and said, “It’s okay, it’s all right.” He was
sobbing when he finally spoke. It didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t talking about
what had happened with George or with his mom but about what had happened at the jail.

“There were three men who hurt me on the first night. They touched me and made me do
things.” Tears were streaming down his face. His voice was high-pitched and strained with
anguish.

“They came back the next night and hurt me a lot,” he said, becoming more hysterical with
each word. Then he looked in my face for the first time.

“There were so many last night. I don’t know how many there were, but they hurt me.…”
He was crying too hard to finish his sentence. He gripped my jacket with a force I wouldn’t
have imagined he was capable of exerting.
I held him and told him as gently as I could, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”
I’d never held anyone who gripped me as tightly as that child or who cried as hard or as long.
It seemed like his tears would never end. He would tire and then start again. I just decided to
hold him until he stopped. It was almost an hour before he calmed down and the crying
stopped. I promised him that I would try to get him out of there right away. He begged me
not to leave, but I assured him that I would be back that day. We never talked about the
crime.
When I left the jail, I was more angry than sad. I kept asking myself, “Who is responsible
for this? How could we ever allow this?” I went directly to the sheriff’s office inside the jail
and explained to the overweight, middle-aged sheriff what the child had told me, and I
insisted that they immediately place him in a protected single cell. The sheriff listened with a
distracted look on his face, but when I said I was going to see the judge, he agreed to move
the child into a protected area immediately. I then went back across the street to the
courthouse and found the judge, who called the prosecutor. When the prosecutor arrived in
the judge’s chambers, I told them that the child had been sexually abused and raped. They
agreed to move him to a nearby juvenile facility within the next several hours.
I decided to take on the case. We ultimately got Charlie’s case transferred to juvenile court,
where the shooting was adjudicated as a juvenile offense. That meant Charlie wouldn’t be
sent to an adult prison, and he would likely be released before he turned eighteen, in just a
few years. I visited Charlie regularly, and in time he recovered. He was a smart, sensitive
child who was tormented by what he’d done and what he’d been through.
At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of
incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that
they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do

anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn’t expect to hear
from them, but within days they called, and they were persistent. We eventually agreed that
they would write a letter to Charlie and send it to me to pass on to him. When I received the
letter weeks later, I read it. It was remarkable.

Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were a white couple in their mid-seventies from a small community
northeast of Birmingham. They were kind and generous people who were active in their local
United Methodist church. They never missed a Sunday service and were especially drawn to
children in crisis. They spoke softly and always seemed to be smiling but never appeared to
be anything less than completely genuine and compassionate. They were affectionate with
each other in a way that was endearing, frequently holding hands and leaning into each
other. They dressed like farmers and owned ten acres of land, where they grew vegetables
and lived simply. Their one and only grandchild, whom they had helped raise, had committed
suicide when he was a teenager, and they had never stopped grieving for him. Their grandson
struggled with mental health problems during his short life, but he was a smart kid and they
had been putting money away to send him to college. They explained in their letter that they
wanted to use the money they’d saved for their grandson to help Charlie.

Eventually, Charlie and this couple began corresponding with one another, building up to
the day when the Jenningses met Charlie at the juvenile detention facility. They later told me
that they “loved him instantly.” Charlie’s grandmother had died a few months after she first
called me, and his mother was still struggling after the tragedy of the shooting and Charlie’s
incarceration. Charlie had been apprehensive about meeting with the Jenningses because he
thought they wouldn’t like him, but he told me after they left how much they seemed to care
about him and how comforting that was. The Jenningses became his family.

At one point early on, I tried to caution them against expecting too much from Charlie after
his release. “You know, he’s been through a lot. I’m not sure he can just carry on as if nothing
has ever happened. I want you to understand he may not be able to do everything you’d like
him to do.”

They never accepted my warnings. Mrs. Jennings was rarely disagreeable or argumentative,
but I had learned that she would grunt when someone said something she didn’t completely
accept. She told me, “We’ve all been through a lot, Bryan, all of us. I know that some have
been through more than others. But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for
one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.”

The Jenningses helped Charlie get his general equivalency degree in detention and insisted
on financing his college education. They were there, along with his mother, to take him home
when he was released.

Chapter Seven

Justice Denied

Walter’s appeal was denied.
The seventy-page opinion from the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals affirming his

conviction and death sentence was devastating. I’d filed a lengthy brief that documented the
insufficiency of the evidence and raised every legal deficiency in the trial that I could
identify. I argued that there was no credible corroboration of Myers’s testimony and that
under Alabama law the State couldn’t rely exclusively on the testimony of an accomplice. I
argued that there was prosecutorial misconduct, racially discriminatory jury selection, and an
improper change of venue. I even challenged Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s override of the jury’s
life sentence, though I knew the reduction of an innocent man’s death sentence to life
imprisonment without parole would still have been an egregious miscarriage of justice. The
court rejected all of my arguments.

I didn’t think it would turn out this way. At the oral argument months earlier, I’d been
hopeful as I walked into the imposing Alabama Judicial Building and stood in the grand
appellate courtroom that was formerly a Scottish Rite Freemasonry temple. Constructed in
the 1920s, the building was renovated into a cavernous courthouse in the 1940s, complete
with marble floors and an impressive domed ceiling. It stood at the end of Dexter Avenue in
Montgomery, across the street from the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. had pastored during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A block away was
the state capitol, adorned with three banners: the American flag, the white and red state flag
of Alabama, and the battle flag of the Confederacy.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals courtroom was on the second floor. The chief
judge of the court was former governor John Patterson. He had made national news in the
1960s as a fierce opponent of civil rights and racial integration. In 1958, with the backing of
the Ku Klux Klan, he defeated George Wallace for governor. His positions were even more
pro-segregation than Wallace’s (who, having learned his lesson, would become the most
famous segregationist in America, declaring in 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever” just a block away from this courthouse). When he was attorney general
before becoming governor, Patterson banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama and

blocked civil rights boycotts and protests in Tuskegee and Montgomery. As governor, he
withheld law enforcement protection for the Freedom Riders—the black and white college
students and activists who traveled south in the early 1960s to desegregate public facilities in
recognition of new federal laws. When the Freedom Riders’ bus traveled through Alabama,
they were abandoned by the police. Alone and unprotected, they were beaten violently, and
their bus was bombed.

Still, I forced myself to be hopeful. That was all long ago. During my argument, the court’s
five judges looked at me with curiosity but asked few questions. I chose to interpret their
silence as agreement. I hoped they saw so little support for the conviction that they didn’t
think there was much to discuss. Judge Patterson’s only remark during the oral argument
came at the end, when he slowly but firmly asked a single question that echoed through the
mostly empty courtroom.

“Where are you from?”
I was thrown by the question and hesitated before answering.
“I live in Montgomery, sir.”
I had foolishly discouraged McMillian’s family from attending the oral argument because I
knew that the issues were fairly arcane and that there would be very little discussion of the
facts. Supporters would have to take off from work and make the long drive to Montgomery
for an early morning argument. Since each side had only thirty minutes to present, I hadn’t
thought it worth the effort. When I sat down after the argument, I regretted that decision. I
would have appreciated some sympathetic faces in the courtroom to signal to the court that
this case was different, but there were none.
An assistant attorney general then presented the State’s arguments—capital cases on appeal
were managed by the attorney general, not the local district attorney. The State’s lawyer
argued that this was a routine capital murder case and that the death penalty had been
appropriately imposed. Following the oral argument, I still had hope that the court would
overturn the conviction and sentence because it was so clearly unsupported by reliable facts.
State law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case, and
there simply wasn’t any in Walter’s case. I believed that the court would have a hard time
affirming a conviction with so little evidence. I was wrong.

I drove to the prison to deliver the news. Walter didn’t say anything as I explained the
situation, but he had a strange, despairing look on his face. I had tried to prepare him for the
possibility that it could take years to get his conviction overturned, but he had gotten his
hopes up.

“They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I
didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.”

“We’re just getting started, Walter,” I replied. “There is a lot more to do, and we’re going to
make them confront this.”

I was telling the truth: We did have to press on. Our plan was to ask the Court of Criminal
Appeals to reconsider its decision, and if that turned out to be a dead end, we would seek
review in the Alabama Supreme Court. And we had uncovered even more evidence of
Walter’s innocence.

After filing the appeal brief, I’d continued investigating the case intensively. If we hadn’t

come up with so much new evidence to prove Walter’s innocence, I think the court’s ruling
would have been even more overwhelming. I told Walter before I left the prison, “They don’t
know what we now know about your innocence. As soon as we present the new evidence to
them, they’ll think differently.” My hopefulness was genuine, in spite of everything that had
happened already. But I was underestimating the resistance we would face.

I’d finally been able to hire some additional lawyers for the organization, which gave me
more time to investigate Walter’s case. One of my new hires was Michael O’Connor, a recent
Yale Law School graduate with a passion for helping people in trouble that had been kindled
by his own struggles earlier in life. The son of Irish immigrants, Michael had grown up
outside of Philadelphia in a tough working-class neighborhood. When his high school friends
started experimenting with hard drugs, so did Mike, and he soon developed a heroin
addiction. His life descended into a nightmare of drug dependency and chaos, complete with
the growing risk of death by overdose. For several years he floated from one crisis to another
until the overdose death of a close friend motivated him to crawl his way back to sobriety.
Throughout all of this heartache, his family had never abandoned him. They helped him
stabilize his life and find his way back to college. At Penn State he revealed himself to be a
brilliant student, graduating summa cum laude. His academic credentials got him into Yale
Law School, but his heart was still connected to all the brokenness his years on the street had
shown him.

When I interviewed him for the job, he was apologetic about the darker episodes in his
past, but I thought he was perfect for the kind of staff we were trying to build. He signed up,
moved to Montgomery, and without hesitation jumped into the McMillian case with me. We
spent days tracking leads, interviewing dozens of people, following wild rumors, investigating
different theories. I was increasingly persuaded that we would have to figure out who really
had killed Ronda Morrison to win Walter’s release. Aside from my appreciation for Michael’s
invaluable help with the work itself, I was grateful finally to have someone around to share
the insanity of the case with—just as I was discovering that it was even crazier than I
thought.

After a few months of investigation, we’d uncovered strong evidence to support Walter’s
innocence. We discovered that Bill Hooks had been paid by Sheriff Tate for his testimony
against Walter—we found checks in the county’s financial records showing close to $5,000 in
payments to Hooks in reward money and “expenses.” Sheriff Tate had also paid Hooks money
to travel back and forth out of the county around the time of the trial. This information
should have been disclosed to Walter’s counsel prior to trial so that they could have used it to
cast doubt on the credibility of Hooks’s testimony.

We also found out that Hooks had been released from jail immediately after giving the
police his statement that he’d seen Walter’s “low-rider” truck at the cleaners on the day of the
murder. We found court records revealing that the D.A. and the sheriff, who are county
officials, had somehow gotten city charges and fines against Hooks dismissed, even though
they had no authority in city courts. Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that Hooks had
charges against him dismissed in exchange for cooperation with authorities was information
that the State was obligated to reveal to the defense. But, of course, they hadn’t.

We found the white man who was running the store on the day that Ralph Myers came in
for the purpose of giving a note to Walter. Walter had tried to persuade his original lawyers

to speak to this man, but they had failed to do so. After Walter described the location of the
store, we were able to track him down. The storeowner recounted his memory of that day:
Myers had sought out Walter—but had to ask the storeowner which of the several black men
in the store was Walter McMillian. Months after the crime, the storeowner was adamant that
Myers had never seen Walter McMillian before.

In a church basement, Walter’s sister found flyers advertising the fish fry held at Walter’s
house; they confirmed that the event had taken place on the same day as the Morrison
murder. A white storeowner who had no relationship to Walter or his family had kept a copy
of that flyer for some reason, and he confirmed that he had received it before the Morrison
murder. We even tracked down Clay Kast, the white mechanic who had modified Walter’s
truck and converted it to a low-rider. He confirmed that the work had been done over six
months after Ronda Morrison was murdered. This proved that McMillian’s truck had had no
modifications or special features and therefore could not have been the truck described by
Myers and Hooks at the trial.

I was feeling very good about the progress we were making when I got a call that would
become the most significant break in the case.

The voice said, “Mr. Stevenson, this is Ralph Myers.”
Our secretary had told me there was a “Mr. Miles” on the phone, so I was a little shocked to
hear Ralph Myers on the other end of the line. Before I could compose myself, he spoke
again.
“I think you need to come and see me. I have something I need to tell you,” he said
dramatically.
Myers was imprisoned at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Alabama, and
Michael and I made plans to meet him there in three days.
Michael and I had started running a few miles at night after work to help us wind down
from the increasingly long work days. Montgomery has a beautiful park that houses the
Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which brings nationally acclaimed playwrights and actors to
Alabama to perform Shakespeare and modern theatrical productions. The theater is set
among hundreds of acres of beautifully maintained parkland with lakes and ponds. There are
several trails for running. That evening we spent most of our run speculating about what
Myers would tell us.
“Why would Myers call us now?” Michael asked. “Can you imagine just going into a
courtroom and straight-up making up a story that puts an innocent man on death row? I’m
not sure we can trust anything he says.”
“Well, you may be right, but he had a lot of help in putting together that testimony.
Remember, they also put Myers on death row to coerce some of those statements. Who
knows? He may be in touch with the State now, and this is some kind of setup where they are
trying to mislead us.”
I hadn’t seriously considered that possibility until our run that night. I thought again about
how sleazy Myers had been during the trial. “We have to be careful to not reveal information
to Myers—just get information he has. But we have to talk to him because if he recants his
trial testimony, the State has nothing on Walter.”
We agreed that depending on what he had to say, Myers could change everything for us.
We had made a lot of progress in disproving the testimony of Bill Hooks; with the appearance

of Darnell Houston, the new evidence about the condition of Walter’s truck, and the discovery
of the assistance given Hooks by law enforcement, his testimony was now riddled with
credibility issues. But getting a recantation from Myers would be a much bigger deal. Myers’s
bizarre accusations and testimony were the basis of the State’s entire case.

Having read Myers’s testimony and reviewed the records that were available about him, I
knew that he had a tragic background and a complex personality. Walter and his family had
described Myers as pure evil for the lies he had told during the trial. The experience of being
so coldly lied about at trial by someone you don’t even know was one of the most disquieting
parts of the trial for Walter. When Walter called me at the office the next day, I told him we’d
heard from Myers and that we were going to see what he had to say. Walter warned me:
“He’s a snake. Be careful.”

Michael and I drove two hours to the state prison in Springville, in St. Clair County. The
prison is in a rural area northeast of Birmingham, where the Alabama terrain starts to turn
rocky and mountainous. The maximum-security prison was more recently built than Holman
or Donaldson, the other maximum-security prisons in Alabama, but no one would suggest
that St. Clair was modern. Michael and I cleared security at the prison entrance; the guard
who patted us down said he’d been working at the prison for three months, and this was the
first time he’d had a legal visit during his shift. We were directed down a long corridor that
led to a flight of stairs that took us deeper inside the prison. We were admitted through
several secure metal doors into the large room that served as the visitation area. It was
typical: There were vending machines against the back walls and small rectangular tables
where inmates could meet with family members. The familiarity of the setting did little to
calm us. Michael and I put our notepads and pens on one of the tables and then paced around
the room, waiting for Myers.

When Myers walked into the visitation area, I was surprised at how old he seemed. His hair
was almost completely gray, which made him seem frail and vulnerable. He was also shorter
with a much smaller body frame than I was expecting. His testimony had caused so much
anguish for Walter and his family that I had created a larger-than-life image of him. He
walked toward us but stopped short when he saw Michael and nervously blurted out, “Who is
he? You didn’t tell me you were bringing anybody with you.” Myers had a thick Southern
accent. Up close, his scars made him appear more sympathetic than menacing or villainous.

“This is Michael O’Connor. He’s a lawyer in my office working with me on this case.
Michael is just helping me investigate this case.”

“Well, people told me I could trust you. I don’t know anything about him.”
“I promise, he’s fine.” I glanced over at Michael, who was trying his best to look
trustworthy, before turning back to Myers. “Please have a seat.”
He looked at Michael skeptically and then slowly sat down. My plan was to try to ease him
into the conversation by letting him know that we just wanted the truth. But before I could
say anything, Myers blurted out a full recantation of his trial testimony.
“I lied. Everything I said at McMillian’s trial was a lie. I’ve lost a lot of sleep and have been
in a lot of pain over this. I can’t be quiet any longer.”
“The testimony you gave at trial against Walter McMillian was a lie?” I asked cautiously.
My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay as steady as I could. I was afraid that if I seemed

too eager or too surprised—too anything—he might retreat.
“It was all a lie. What I’m going to tell you is going to blow your mind, Mr. Stevenson.”
He held his stare on me dramatically before turning to Michael. “You, too, Jimmy

Connors.” It didn’t take many conversations with Ralph before it became clear that he had
difficulty remembering names.

“Mr. Myers, you know I’m going to want you to not only tell me the truth but also tell the
court the truth. Are you willing to do that?”

I was nervous to push so quickly, but I needed to be clear. I didn’t want a private
performance.

“That’s why I called you.” He sounded surprised that there could be any question about his
intentions. “I’ve been in a group therapy class here. You’re supposed to be real honest. We
been talking about honesty for nearly three months. Last week people were talking about all
the bad shit that happened to them when they were kids and all the bad things they done.”

Myers was picking up steam as he spoke.
“I finally told the group, ‘Well, I can top all you sons ’a bitches, I done put a damn man on
death row by lying in damn court.’ ”
He paused dramatically.
“After I told all of ’em what I’d done, everybody said I needed to make it right. That’s what
I’m tryin’ to do.” He paused again to let me take it all in. “Hey, y’all gonna buy me a damn
soda, or am I just gonna sit here all day looking at them damn vending machines and pouring
my heart out?” He smiled for the first time since we’d been together. Michael jumped up and
walked over to buy him a drink.
“Hey, Jimmy, Sunkist Orange, if they got it.”
For more than two hours, I asked questions and Ralph gave answers. By the end, he did, in
fact, blow my mind. He told us about being pressured by the sheriff and the ABI and
threatened with the death penalty if he didn’t testify against McMillian. He made accusations
of official corruption, talked about his involvement in the Pittman murder, and revealed his
earlier attempts to recant. He ultimately admitted that he had never known anything about
the Morrison murder, had no clue what had happened to her or anything else at all about the
crime. He said that he had told lots of people—from the D.A. on down—that he had been
coerced to testify falsely against Walter. If even half of what he said was true, there were a lot
of people involved in this case who knew, from the mouth of his sole accuser, that Walter
McMillian had had nothing to do with the murder of Ronda Morrison.
Ralph was on his third Sunkist Orange when he stopped his stream of confessions, leaned
forward, and beckoned us closer. He spoke in a whisper to Michael and me.
“You know they’ll try to kill you if you actually get to the bottom of everything.”
We would learn that Ralph could never let a meeting end without dropping some final
dramatic insight, observation, or prediction. I reassured him that we would be careful.

On the drive back to Montgomery, Michael and I debated how much we could trust Myers.
What he told us about the McMillian case all made sense. His story at trial was so implausible
that it was easy to believe that he had been pressured to testify falsely. The corruption
narrative that he seemed intent to expose was harder to assess. Myers claimed to have
committed the Vickie Pittman murder under the direction of another local sheriff; he laid out

to us a widespread conspiracy involving police, drug dealing, and money laundering. It was
quite a tale.

We spent weeks following up on the leads that Myers had provided. He admitted to us that
he had never met Walter and only knew of him through Karen Kelly. He also confirmed that
he had been spending time with Karen Kelly and that she was involved in the Pittman
murder. So we decided to confirm the story with Kelly herself, now a prisoner at the Tutwiler
Prison for Women, where she was serving a ten-year sentence for the Pittman murder.
Tutwiler is one of the state’s oldest prisons and the only prison in the state for women. It has
fewer security restrictions than the men’s prisons. When Michael and I drove up to the gate,
we could see incarcerated women hovering outside the prison entrance with no officers in
view. The women eyed Michael and me carefully before greeting us with curious smiles. We
were subjected to a very cursory pat-down in the prison lobby by a male officer before being
admitted through the barred gate to the main prison area. We were told to wait for Karen
Kelly in a very small room that was empty except for a square table.

Kelly was a slender white woman in her mid-thirties who walked into the room wearing no
restraints or handcuffs. She seemed surprisingly comfortable, shaking my hand confidently
before nodding at Michael. She was wearing makeup, including a garish shade of green eye
shadow. She sat down and announced that Walter had been framed and that she was grateful
finally to be able to tell someone. When we began with our questions, she quickly confirmed
that Myers had not known Walter before the Morrison murder.

“Ralph is a fool. He thought he could trust those crooked cops, and he let them talk him
into saying he was involved with a crime he didn’t know anything about. He’s done enough
bad that he didn’t need to go around making stuff up.”

Though she was calm at the outset of our interview, she became increasingly emotional as
she started detailing the events surrounding the case. She wept more than once. She spoke
with remorse about how her life had spiraled out of control when she started abusing drugs.

“I’m not a bad person, but I’ve made some really foolish, bad decisions.”
She was especially upset that Walter was on death row.
“I feel like I’m the reason that he’s in prison. He’s just not the kind of person that would kill
somebody, I know that.” Then her tone turned bitter. “I made a lot of mistakes, but those
people should be ashamed. They’ve done just as much bad as I’ve done. Sheriff Tate only had
one thing on his mind. He just kept saying, ‘Why you want to sleep with niggers? Why you
want to sleep with niggers?’ It was awful, and he’s awful.” She paused and looked down at
her hands. “But I’m awful, too. Look at what I’ve done,” she said sadly.

I began getting letters from Karen Kelly after our visit. She wanted me to tell Walter how
sorry she was about what had happened to him. She said she still cared about him a great
deal. It wasn’t clear what we could expect from Karen if we got a new hearing in court, other
than to confirm that Ralph had never met Walter. It was clear that she saw Walter as the kind
of person who would never kill someone violently, which was consistent with the opinion of
everyone who knew him. She hadn’t dealt with the police much around the Morrison murder
and didn’t have useful information pointing to their misconduct, aside from being able to
show how they were provoked by her relationship with Walter.

Michael and I decided to spend more time looking into the Pittman murder; we thought it

might give us some perspective on the coercion that was leveled against Myers. We now knew
that because Myers had recanted his accusations against Walter before the trial, the State
might not be entirely surprised to hear that he was denying McMillian’s involvement in the
crime. We needed as much objective evidence as we could find to confirm the truth of what
Myers was now saying. Understanding the Pittman case and documenting the other
demonstrably false things Myers had asserted would strengthen our evidence.

Vickie Pittman’s murder had been all but forgotten. Monroe County officials had reduced
Myers’s and Kelly’s sentences in exchange for Myers’s testimony against Walter. How they
managed to reduce sentences in the Pittman case, which was outside their jurisdiction in
another county, was another anomaly. Myers insisted that there were other people besides
him and Kelly involved in the Pittman murder, including a corrupt local sheriff. There were
still questions about why Vickie Pittman had been killed. Myers told us that her murder had
everything to do with drug debts and threats she had made to expose corruption.

We had learned from some of the early police reports that the father of Vickie Pittman, Vic
Pittman, had been implicated as a suspect in her death. Vickie Pittman had had two aunts,
Mozelle and Onzelle, who had been collecting information and desperately seeking answers
to the questions surrounding their niece’s death. We reached out to them on the off chance
that they’d be willing to speak with us, and we were astounded when they eagerly agreed to
talk.

Mozelle and Onzelle were twin sisters—they were also colorful, opinionated talkers who
could be bracingly direct. The two middle-aged, rural white women spent so much time
together that they could finish each other’s sentences without even seeming to notice. They
described themselves as “country tough” and presented themselves as fearless, relentless
women who could not be intimidated.

“Just so you know: We’re gun owners, so don’t bring no drama when you come.” This was
Mozelle’s last warning before I hung up the phone with her the first time we talked.

Michael and I traveled to rural Escambia County and were greeted by the twins. They
invited us in, sat us at the kitchen table, and wasted no time.

“Did your client kill our baby?” Mozelle asked bluntly.
“No, ma’am, I sincerely believe he did not.”
“Do you know who did?”
I sighed. “Well, not completely. We’ve spoken to Ralph Myers and believe that he and
Karen Kelly were involved, but Myers insists that there were others involved as well.”
Mozelle looked at Onzelle and leaned back.
“We know there’s more involved,” said Onzelle. The sisters voiced suspicions about their
brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected
and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they
were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group.
“They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about
us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we
had some say.”

Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice
system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more

responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that
not all crime victims received the same treatment.

Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that
everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The
party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the
“Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an
offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime
victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of
cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table
during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in
the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started
introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a
representative of the civic authorities.

In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence
about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional.
The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a
four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a
child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court
prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too
inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics
argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were
racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their
deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v.
Maryland.

The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it
seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, the Court
reversed itself in Payne v. Tennessee and upheld the rights of states to present evidence about
the character of the victim in a capital sentencing trial.

With the Supreme Court now giving its constitutional blessing to a more visible and
protected role for individual victims in the criminal trial process, changes in the American
criminal justice process accelerated. Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to
create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for
individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. Victims’
advocates were added to parole boards, and in most states they were given a formal role in
state and local prosecutors’ offices. Victim services and outreach became critical components
of the prosecutorial function. Some states made executions more accommodating of victims
by increasing the number of people from the victim’s family who could watch the execution.

State legislatures enacted harsh new punishments for crimes, naming statutes after
particular victims. Megan’s Law, for example, which broadened state power to create sex
offender registries, was named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and
murdered by a man who had previously been convicted of child molestation. Instead of a
faceless state or community, crime victims were featured at trial, and criminal cases took on
the dynamics of a traditional civil trial, pitting the family of the victim against the offender.
Press coverage hyped the personal nature of the conflict between the offender and specific

victim. A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in
which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how
criminal cases would be managed.

However, as Mozelle and Onzelle discovered, focusing on the status of the victim became
one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. Poor and minority
victims of crime experienced additional victimization by the system itself. The Supreme
Court’s decision in Payne appeared shortly after the Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a
case that presented convincing empirical evidence that the race of the victim is the greatest
predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that
case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty
if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were replicated in every
other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even
though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on
death row were there for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white
victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more.

Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support
from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether
a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate. If your family had lost a
loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or serious assault, your victimization
might be ignored if you had loved ones who were incarcerated. The expansion of victims’
rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected
and valued than others.

More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police,
prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the
first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle
told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do
what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death.

We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t
be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State
had no obligation to let us see those records and files. So we decided to file what is known as
a Rule 32 petition, which would put us back in a trial court with the opportunity to present
new evidence and obtain discovery, including access to the State’s files.

Rule 32 petitions are required to include claims that were not raised at trial or on appeal
and that could not have been raised at trial or on appeal. They are the vehicle to challenge a
conviction based on ineffective counsel, the State’s failure to disclose evidence, and most
important, new evidence of innocence. Michael and I put a petition together that asserted all
of these claims, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, and filed it in the Monroe
County Circuit Court.

The document, which alleged that Walter McMillian was unfairly tried, wrongly convicted,
and illegally sentenced, drew a lot of attention in Monroeville. Three years had passed since
the trial. The initial confirmation of Walter’s conviction on appeal had generated significant
press in the community, and most people now felt that Walter’s guilt was a settled matter. All
there was left to do was wait for an execution date. Judge Key had retired, and none of the

new Monroe County judges seemed to want to touch our petition, so it was transferred back
to Baldwin County under the theory that the postconviction appeal should be handled in the
same county as the initial trial. This made little sense to us, because a Monroe County judge
had presided over the trial, but there was nothing we could do.

Surprisingly, the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to stay our direct appeal process so that
the Rule 32 petition could proceed. The general rule was that the direct appeal had to be
completed before a postconviction collateral appeal under Rule 32 could be initiated. By
staying the case, the Alabama Supreme Court had signaled there was something unusual
about Walter’s case that warranted further review in the lower courts. The Baldwin County
Circuit Court judge was now obligated to review our case and could be forced to grant our
discovery motions, which would require disclosure of all police and prosecutorial files. This
was a very positive development.

We needed to have another meeting with the district attorney, Tommy Chapman, but this
time we’d be going in armed with a court order to turn over police and prosecutorial files. We
would also finally meet, in the flesh, the law enforcement officers involved in Walter’s
prosecution: the D.A.’s investigator, Larry Ikner; ABI agent Simon Benson; and Sheriff Tom
Tate.

Chapman suggested that we come to his office in the Monroe County courthouse so that
they could turn over all the files together. We agreed. When we arrived, the men were
already there. Tate was a tall, heavy-set white man who had come to the meeting in boots,
jeans, and a light shirt. Ikner was another white man in his mid-forties, wearing the same
outfit. Neither of them smiled much—they greeted Michael and me with the bemused
curiosity to which I was getting accustomed. The men knew that we were accusing them of
misconduct, but for the most part they remained civil. At one point Tate told Michael that he
knew, as soon as he saw him, that he was “a Yankee.”

Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.”
The joke died in the silent room.
Undeterred, Michael continued, “I went to Penn State. The mascot at Penn State is—”
“We kicked your ass in ’78.” Tate made the statement as if he had just won the lottery.
Penn State and the University of Alabama had been football rivals in the 1970s, when both
schools had had successful programs and iconic coaches, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Joe
Paterno at Penn State. Alabama had defeated the number-one-ranked Penn State team 14–7
to win the 1978 national championship.
Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking
nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great
relief, he seemed to understand.
“How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends
and family had given him.
“We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as
blandly and politely as I could.
“Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.”
I decided to let that pass and move things forward.
“I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files
you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?”

“We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just
like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this
suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner.

“Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped
out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of
pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.”

“The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something
confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.”

Chapman nodded. We got the files and left Monroeville with a lot of excitement about what
we might find in the hundreds of pages of records we’d received. Back in Montgomery, we
eagerly started reviewing them, and not just the files from the police and prosecutors. With
our discovery order from the court, we were able to collect records from Taylor Hardin, the
mental health facility where Myers was sent after he first refused to testify. We got the ABI
file from Simon Benson, the only black ABI agent in South Alabama, as he had proudly told
us. We got Monroeville city police department records and other city files. We even got
Escambia County records and exhibits on the Vickie Pittman murder. The files were
astonishing.

We might have been influenced by the pain of Mozelle and Onzelle or drawn in by the
elaborate conspiracies that Ralph Myers had described, but we soon started asking questions
about some of the law enforcement officers whose names kept coming up around the Pittman
murder. We even decided to talk to the FBI about some of what we had learned.

It wasn’t long after that when the bomb threats started.

Chapter Eight

All God’s Children

UNCRIED TEARS
Imagine teardrops left uncried
From pain trapped inside
Waiting to escape
Through the windows of your eyes
“Why won’t you let us out?”
The tears question the conscience
“Relinquish your fears and doubts
And heal yourself in the process.”
The conscience told the tears
“I know you really want me to cry
But if I release you from bondage,
In gaining your freedom you die.”
The tears gave it some thought
Before giving the conscience an answer
“If crying brings you to triumph
Then dying’s not such a disaster.”
IAN E. MANUEL, Union Correctional Institution

Trina Garnett was the youngest of twelve children living in the poorest section of Chester,
Pennsylvania, a financially distressed municipality outside of Philadelphia. The
extraordinarily high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment in Chester intersected with
the worst-ranked public school system among Pennsylvania’s 501 districts. Close to 46

percent of the city’s children were living below the federal poverty level.
Trina’s father, Walter Garnett, was a former boxer whose failed career had turned him into

a violent, abusive alcoholic well known to local police for throwing a punch with little
provocation. Trina’s mother, Edith Garnett, was sickly after bearing so many children, some
of whom were conceived during rapes by her husband. The older and sicker Edith became,
the more she found herself a target of Walter’s rage. He would regularly punch, kick, and
verbally abuse her in front of the children. Walter would often go to extremes, stripping Edith
naked and beating her until she writhed on the floor in pain while her children looked on
fearfully. When she lost consciousness during the beatings, Walter would shove a stick down
her throat to revive her for more abuse. Nothing was safe in the Garnett home. Trina once
watched her father strangle her pet dog into silence because it wouldn’t stop barking. He beat
the animal to death with a hammer and threw its limp body out a window.

Trina had twin sisters, Lynn and Lynda, who were a year older than her. They taught her to
play “invisible” when she was a small child to shield her from their father when he was drunk
and prowling their apartment with his belt, stripping the children naked, and beating them
randomly. Trina was taught to hide under the bed or in a closet and remain as quiet as
possible.

Trina showed signs of intellectual disabilities and other troubles at a young age. When she
was a toddler, she became seriously ill after ingesting lighter fluid when she was left
unattended. At the age of five, she accidently set herself on fire, resulting in severe burns over
her chest, stomach, and back. She spent weeks in a hospital enduring painful skin grafts that
left her terribly scarred.

Edith died when Trina was just nine. Trina’s older sisters tried to take care of her, but when
Walter began sexually abusing them, they fled. After the older siblings left home, Walter’s
abuse focused on Trina, Lynn, and Lynda. The girls ran away from home and began roaming
the streets of Chester. Trina and her sisters would eat out of garbage cans; sometimes they
would not eat for days. They slept in parks and public bathrooms. The girls stayed with their
older sister Edy until Edy’s husband began sexually abusing them. Their older siblings and
aunts would sometimes provide temporary shelter, but the living situation would get
disrupted by violence or death, and so Trina would find herself wandering the streets again.

Her mother’s death, the abuse, and the desperate circumstances all exacerbated Trina’s
emotional and mental health problems. She would sometimes become so distraught and ill
that her sisters would have to find a relative to take her to the hospital. But she was penniless
and was never allowed to stay long enough to become stable or recover.

Late at night in August 1976, fourteen-year-old Trina and her friend, sixteen-year-old
Francis Newsome, climbed through the window of a row house in Chester. The girls wanted
to talk to the boys who lived there. The mother of these boys had forbidden her children from
playing with Trina, but Trina wanted to see them. Once she’d climbed into the house, Trina
lit matches to find her way to the boys’ room. The house caught fire. It spread quickly, and
two boys who were sleeping in the home died from smoke asphyxiation. Their mother
accused Trina of starting the fire intentionally, but Trina and her friend insisted that it was an
accident.

Trina was traumatized by the boys’ deaths and could barely speak when the police arrested
her. She was so nonfunctional and listless that her appointed lawyer thought she was

incompetent to stand trial. Defendants who are deemed incompetent can’t be tried in
adversarial criminal proceedings—meaning that the State can’t prosecute them unless they
become well enough to defend themselves. Criminally accused people facing trial are entitled
to treatment and services. But Trina’s lawyer failed to file the appropriate motions or present
evidence to support an incompetency determination for Trina. The lawyer, who was
subsequently disbarred and jailed for unrelated criminal misconduct, also never challenged
the State’s decision to try Trina as an adult. As a result, Trina was forced to stand trial for
second-degree murder in an adult courthouse. At trial, Francis Newsome testified against
Trina in exchange for the charges against her being dropped. Trina was convicted of second-
degree murder, and the trial moved to the sentencing phase.

Delaware County Circuit Judge Howard Reed found that Trina had no intent to kill. But
under Pennsylvania law, the judge could not take the absence of intent into account during
sentencing. He could not consider Trina’s age, mental illness, poverty, the abuse she had
suffered, or the tragic circumstances surrounding the fire. Pennsylvania sentencing law was
inflexible: For those convicted of second-degree murder, mandatory life imprisonment
without the possibility of parole was the only sentence. Judge Reed expressed serious
misgivings about the sentence he was forced to impose. “This is the saddest case I’ve ever
seen,” he wrote. For a tragic crime committed at fourteen, Trina was condemned to die in
prison.

After sentencing, Trina was immediately shipped off to an adult prison for women. Now
sixteen, Trina walked through the gates of the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, an
adult prison for women, terrified, still suffering from trauma and mental illness, and intensely
vulnerable—with the knowledge that she would never leave. Prison spared Trina the
uncertainty of homelessness but presented new dangers and challenges. Not long after she
arrived at Muncy, a male correctional officer pulled her into a secluded area and raped her.

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the
correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and
gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was
completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed
to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or
handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery.

Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of
events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her
son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional
and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she
required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors
diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to
trauma.

Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a
judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the
correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for
murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to
compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers.

In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of

nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life
imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were
between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders
condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

In 1990, Ian Manuel and two older boys attempted to rob a couple who were out for dinner
in Tampa, Florida. Ian was thirteen years old. When Debbie Baigre resisted, Ian shot her with
a handgun given to him by the older boys. The bullet went through Baigre’s cheek, shattering
several teeth and severely damaging her jaw. All three boys were arrested and charged with
armed robbery and attempted homicide.

Ian’s appointed lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, assuring him that he would be
sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The lawyer didn’t realize that two of the charges against
Ian were punishable with sentences of life imprisonment without parole. The judge accepted
Ian’s plea and then sentenced him to life with no parole. Even though he was thirteen, the
judge condemned Ian for living in the streets, for not having good parental supervision, and
for his multiple prior arrests for shoplifting and minor property crimes. Ian was sent to an
adult prison—the Apalachee Correctional Institution, one of the toughest prisons in Florida.
The correctional staff at the prison processing center couldn’t find any uniforms that would fit
a boy Ian’s size, so they cut six inches from the bottom of their smallest pants. Juveniles
housed in adult prisons are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, so the
staff at Apalachee put Ian, who was small for his age, in solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement at Apalachee means living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in
closet. You get your meals through a slot, you do not see other inmates, and you never touch
or get near another human being. If you “act out” by saying something insubordinate or
refusing to comply with an order given to you by a correctional officer, you are forced to
sleep on the concrete floor of your cell without a mattress. If you shout or scream, your time
in solitary is extended; if you hurt yourself by refusing to eat or mutilating your body, your
time in solitary is extended; if you complain to officers or say anything menacing or
inappropriate, your time in solitary is extended. You get three showers a week and are
allowed forty-five minutes in a small caged area for exercise a few times a week. Otherwise
you are alone, hidden away in your concrete box, week after week, month after month.

In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food
tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and
he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in
isolation was extended.

Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.
Once a month, Ian was allowed to make a phone call. Soon after he arrived in prison, on
Christmas Eve in 1992, he used his call to reach out to Debbie Baigre, the woman he shot.
When she answered the phone, Ian spilled out an emotional apology, expressing his deep
regret and remorse. Ms. Baigre was stunned to hear from the boy who had shot her, but she
was moved by his call. She had physically recovered from the shooting and was working to
become a successful bodybuilder and had started a magazine focused on women’s health. She
was a determined woman who didn’t let the shooting derail her from her goals. That first
surprising phone call led to a regular correspondence. Ian had been neglected by his family

before the crime took place. He’d been left to wander the streets with little parental or family
support. In solitary, he met few prisoners or correctional staff. As he sank deeper into despair,
Debbie Baigre became one of the few people in Ian’s life who encouraged him to remain
strong.

After communicating with Ian for several years, Baigre wrote the court and told the judge
who sentenced Ian of her conviction that his sentence was too harsh and that his conditions
of confinement were inhumane. She tried to talk to prison officials and gave interviews to the
press to draw attention to Ian’s plight. “No one knows more than I do how destructive and
reckless Ian’s crime was. But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible,”
she told one reporter. “When this crime was committed, he was a child, a thirteen-year-old
boy with a lot of problems, no supervision, and no help available. We are not children.”

The courts ignored Debbie Baigre’s call for a reduced sentence.
By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without
parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the
crime. All of the youngest condemned children—thirteen or fourteen years of age—were
black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die
in prison for non-homicides.

The section of South Central Los Angeles where Antonio Nuñez lived was plagued by gang
violence. Antonio’s mother would force her children to the floor when shooting erupted
outside their crowded home, which happened with disturbing regularity. Nearly a dozen of
their neighbors were shot and killed after being caught in the crossfire of gun violence.

The difficulties outside Antonio’s home were compounded by severe domestic abuse inside
the home. From the time Antonio was in diapers, he endured abusive beatings by his father,
who hit him with his hand, fist, belt, and extension cords, causing bruises and cuts; he also
witnessed terrifying conflicts in which his parents would violently assault each other and
threaten to kill one another. The violence was so bad that on more than one occasion Antonio
called the police. He began experiencing severe nightmares from which he awoke screaming.
Antonio’s depressed mother neglected him; when he cried, she just left him alone. The only
activity she could recall ever attending for Antonio was his graduation from a Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program in elementary school.

“He was excited to take his picture with the police officer,” she would later say. “He
wanted to be a police officer when he grew up.”

In September 1999, a month after he turned thirteen, Antonio Nuñez was riding his bicycle
near his home when a stranger shot him in his stomach, side, and arm. Antonio collapsed
onto the street. His fourteen-year-old brother José heard him screaming and ran to his aid.
José was shot in the head and killed when he responded to his little brother’s call for help.
Antonio suffered serious internal injuries that hospitalized him for weeks.

When Antonio was released from the hospital, his mother sent him to live with relatives in
Las Vegas, where he tried to recover from the tragedy of José’s death. Antonio was relieved to
be away from the dangers of South Central Los Angeles. He stayed out of trouble, was helpful
and obedient at home, and spent evenings doing his homework with help from his cousin’s
husband. He put the gangs and violence of South Central behind him and showed remarkable
progress. But within a year, California probation authorities ordered him to return to Los

Angeles because he was on probation following his adjudication as a ward of the court for a
prior offense.

In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely
have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done
nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law
enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops,
questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of
these children develop criminal records for behavior that more affluent children engage in
with impunity.

Forced back to South Central, blocks from where his brother was murdered, Antonio
struggled. A court later found that “[l]iving just blocks from where he was shot and his
brother was killed, Nuñez suffered trauma symptoms, including flashbacks, an urgent need to
avoid the area, a heightened awareness of potential threats, and an intensified need to protect
himself from real or perceived threats.” He got his hands on a gun for self-defense but was
quickly arrested for it and placed in a juvenile camp where supervisors reported that he
eagerly participated in and positively responded to the structured environment and guidance
of staff members.

After returning from the camp, Antonio was invited to a party where two men twice
Antonio’s age told him that they were planning to fake a kidnapping to get money from a
relative who would pay the ransom. They insisted that Antonio join them. Fourteen-year-old
Antonio got in a car with the men to pick up the ransom money. The pretend victim sat in the
backseat, while Juan Perez drove and Antonio sat in the passenger seat. Before they arrived
at their Orange County destination to retrieve the money, they found themselves being
followed—and then chased—by two Latino men in a gray van. At some point, Perez and the
other man gave Antonio a gun and told him to shoot at the van, and a dangerous high-speed
shoot-out unfolded. The men chasing them were undercover police officers—but Antonio
didn’t know that when he fired. When a marked police car joined the pursuit, Antonio
dropped the gun just before the car crashed into some trees. No one was injured, but Antonio
and Perez were charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder of the police
officers.

Antonio and his twenty-seven-year-old co-defendant were tried together in a joint trial, and
both were found guilty. Under California law, a juvenile has to be at least sixteen to be
sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murder. But there is no minimum age for
kidnapping, so the Orange County judge sentenced Antonio to imprisonment until death,
asserting that he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated,
despite his difficult background and the absence of any significant criminal history. The judge
sent him to California’s dangerous, overcrowded adult prisons. At fourteen, Antonio became
the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no
one was physically injured.

Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged
are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In the federal system, adults who
unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive
sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years. Many adults convicted of

attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no
reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants,
even in this era of harsh punishments.

Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and
punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that
most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary
across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile
custody until they turned eighteen or twenty-one. At most, they might have stayed in custody
until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record
suggested that they were still a threat to public safety.

In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would
find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually
high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South. For instance,
in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and
Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape
and sentenced to death in Alabama.

In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black
boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Three months earlier,
two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were
separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of
people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his
siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult
searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached
them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers.

The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was
immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they
disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of
interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the
death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a black boy had been arrested for the
murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or
signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family
was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s
family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support. Within
hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu,
but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.

A month later, a trial was convened. Facing charges of first-degree murder, George sat
alone in front of an estimated crowd of fifteen hundred white people who had packed the
courtroom and surrounded the building. No African Americans were allowed inside the
courthouse. George’s white court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations,
called no witnesses. The prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding
George’s alleged confession. The trial was over in a few hours. An all-white jury deliberated
for ten minutes before convicting George of rape and murder. Judge Stoll promptly sentenced
the fourteen-year-old to death. George’s lawyer said there would be no appeal because his
family didn’t have the money to pay for it.

Despite appeals from the NAACP and black clergy, who asked that the sentence be
converted to life imprisonment, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene and George was
sent to Columbia to be executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Small even for his age, the
five foot two, ninety-two-pound Stinney walked up to the chair with a Bible in his hand. He
had to sit on the book when prison staff couldn’t fit the electrodes to his small frame. Alone
in the room, with no family or any people of color present, the terrified child sat in the
oversized electric chair. He frantically searched the room for someone to help but saw only
law enforcement personnel and reporters. The adult-size mask slid off George’s face when the
first jolt of electricity struck his body. Witnesses to the execution could see his “wide open,
tearful eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.” Eighty-one days after being approached by
two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead.
Years later, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family confessed on his
deathbed to killing the girls. Recently, an effort has been launched to exonerate George
Stinney.

The Stinney execution was horrific and heartbreaking, but it reflected the racial politics of
the South more than the way children accused of crimes were generally treated. It was an
example of how policies and norms once directed exclusively at controlling and punishing the
black population have filtered their way into our general criminal justice system. By the late
1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass
incarceration was turning its attention to children.

Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the
juvenile justice system would be unable to cope. Sometimes expressly focusing on black and
brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary
school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for
human life.” Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive,
brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the
exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum
age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult
prosecution and imprisonment.

Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from
prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept in the juvenile system. Tens of
thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with
its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an
increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system.

The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in
America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading
academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it. In 2001,
the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator”
theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence
during the peak years of the early 1990s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than
youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio.
Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of
procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful
postconviction challenges almost impossible.